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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
October 26, 2026

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

Don, Eric and I discuss:

• Why America is at a multi-generational turning point

• Restoring constitutional government and rebalancing America’s alliances

• Eric Metaxas explains why he published my book.

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

• The stakes of the midterms

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

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Our Full Discussion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Metaxas: Understanding Trump’s Larger Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Negotiation, Surprise, and the Art of the Deal

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

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

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

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

Donald Trump went in and made peace. And he did it again and again and again in other conflicts that just seemed intractable, one of which, between India and Pakistan, could have become a nuclear war. All of this requires a degree of bluffing, a degree of concealment, and certainly the art of surprise.

And it’s Donald Trump who’s told us again and again that “the dumbest thing our presidents have done is tell the world exactly what they will and won’t do in advance. You will never see me do that.” Well, guess what? He is constantly throwing everyone off balance. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be explained. It just means that you’re not going to get it if you look at the superficial moves he’s making.

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Results, Moral Clarity, and the Stakes of the Midterms

Don Ma: So, Eric, and Rod, he was talking about this as well in the rally earlier. We were playing that. He was talking about how he ended eight wars and he didn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize. And a woman nobody’s heard of got the Nobel Peace Prize. Those are his words, not mine. I just wanted to throw that in there.

But, Eric, you said every American should read this book. What do you think they would see the world differently, or America at least? What would they see differently after reading this book?

Eric Metaxas: Well, I think what it really boils down to is results. This president is not about appearing to be a good president. He’s about actually getting things done. And his attitude, he has enough confidence. He doesn’t care what people think. And so he’s accomplishing staggering things all the while his critics carp and criticize and carp and criticize. He doesn’t care. He just gets it done and gets it done and gets it done. And it’s brilliant. It’s also quintessentially American.

I mean, you have to think of a character like a Bugs Bunny or Groucho Marx. They win and they bamboozle their enemies constantly. And it’s delightful to watch. It’s entertaining. You don’t know how they do it.

Trump is like that. You don’t know what he’s going to say. He’ll say something. He’ll spin around, say the opposite thing. The media explodes with fury. They can’t bear it. “He’s being inconsistent!” “He doesn’t care!” His point is, look at my results. Look at what I’m getting done.

And let’s be honest. We are dealing with evil. I don’t need to tell the folks watching this station. Communist China has no values except power. They will murder people. They will murder people for their organs. They do not care. They don’t look at things the way most Americans do with a biblical worldview, that we’re created in God’s image, that every human being is sacred and we have rights.

We’re dealing with actual enemies, whether it’s North Korea or China or Putin. They don’t think the way we do.

And so President Trump has to deal with evil actors, not to mention the mullahs in Iran, who have no values that are comparable to our values. And so the question is, how do you deal with lunatics? How do you deal with evil? The Democrats, the left, and many of the RINOs, they’re ignorant, they’re naive, and they’re ineffective.

This president is tremendously effective. He’ll say whatever needs to be said. He’ll play whatever game needs to be played, and he gets it done.

And to me, the most amazing thing is he’s doing it for us. He’s working for us. We elected him. He’s not doing this for the Trump Organization. Yes, he cares about his legacy. But all of the effort that he’s putting in, all of the brilliance that he brings to this job that he is doing, he’s doing for the American people. He’s doing it for his kids and his grandkids and for posterity. And it’s a glorious thing. And in Rod’s book, he explains it.

This is the thing that why I love this book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, because many people are kind of wondering, and you’re never going to find this in most of the media. We just don’t have the time to cover it. The left doesn’t want to cover it. They don’t understand it.

But in the book, Rod explains it. And you think, my goodness, there is a method to Trump’s madness. This is brilliant. We should be celebrating it. We should tell our friends, make sure you vote in the midterms, because if we lose the momentum, we will lose the nation.

This president has been, I believe, appointed by God to save America, to save liberty, that we would be a beacon of liberty to the people around the world, that we would stand strong. That is happening under this president. It is a gift from God. Rod, we’re in an existential crisis, and I believe we will win, but we are in a battle. We’re in a war.

China, Reagan’s Strategy, and the Space Frontier

Don Ma: So, Rod, Eric brings up China, and I’m very glad he did, because early on in your book, you have a few chapters, relatively early on, about China, their strength, the possibility they might overcome the United States and become the top country in the world. So, talk to us about China. What are you saying in your book about the CCP?

Rod D. Martin: Well, the book is divided into sections, and one of them is entitled, “All Trump’s Roads Lead to China.” Donald Trump understands that China is the principal existential geopolitical threat of our era in exactly the same way that the Soviet Union was in a prior time, Reagan’s time.

And Donald Trump understands exactly how Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. He dried up the access they had to the hard currency necessary to compete in an arms race, and then he launched one of the biggest arms races ever. And he did that all while making it too risky for the Soviets to go to war, as a result of which they actually had to deal with their own problems internally without capturing any foreign soil and therefore wealth.

As a result of that, they collapsed. That’s what will happen to the CCP. I can’t guarantee it will happen next Tuesday. It might not happen next decade, but it’s coming because communism doesn’t work. It is a philosophy of power. It is not actually useful for running a country except in the near term.

And so they can murder 65 million people. They had the power to do that. They can continue their genocide against the Uyghurs as they are at this moment. They can continue going after Christians and Falun Gong practitioners and actually harvesting their organs. My gosh, I mean, how evil does it get? And they can do that right now.

But at some point, the overbuilding of ghost cities, the complete command and control economy starts to come apart. And we’re beginning to see that quite a bit, as you and I have talked about a lot on this show.

We’re starting to see that Trump wants to push it over the edge. And the long-term result of that is a pretty simple question: Will the future be communist or will the future be free? So another thing the book deals with is the aspect of space. Elon Musk is bringing down the cost per pound to orbit so much that you’re getting radically more stuff launched into space. Pretty soon, that’ll be people. Pretty soon, that’ll be a city on the Moon, a city on Mars, real manufacturing and mining out there.

And if the Chinese control it, they control the Earth with it. Donald Trump gets it. He talks about it. He just launched this new United States Space Academy. That’s a big deal. All of this is about the future. It’s not about the next election. It’s not even about the 2028 election. It’s about making sure that the future is free and that America leads that and doesn’t sit passively while the Chinese dominate the world.

Don Ma: Okay, Eric, I have to get your reaction before we leave here. Rod making some very strong, very powerful points saying China’s rule, it’s good for its power. It’s not good for the people of China. And talking about China’s organ harvesting using the word evil. I mean, some of these victims, they’re still alive, actually, when their organs, some of them are being harvested. Let me just get your final reactions here.

Eric Metaxas: Well, I think we have to be very blunt and very clear. There is good and there is evil. There is a God who is a judge. If you don’t believe in that God, you think you can do whatever you like to human beings, but they’re created in God’s image and he loves them and he died for them. And if you side with evil, as China has done, eventually it will catch up with you. And that is what we’re seeing.

It can only last so long. The Soviet Union lasted for decades. You need people with courage to stand against it, to call it what it is. There is no question in my mind that there are millions and millions and millions of people in China longing and praying that the corrupt regime will fall. And the fact of the matter is you cannot, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It’s enslavement. It’s cruelty. It’s sadistic. But the point is, if you don’t believe in God, who’s to say what’s right or wrong?

The communist leaders, they don’t believe there’s good and evil. They just believe in themselves. They believe in power. This country, the United States of America, which I love and I will die for, this country stands for something beautiful and good and true.

It’s why I wrote my book on the American Revolution. We need to understand that this country, which celebrates liberty, the opposite of slavery, the opposite of communist tyranny, this country stands as a beacon in the world to lift hope up for the hopeless, for those in places like China who are wondering, will there ever be justice?

I know there will be justice, but we have to fight. Now we’re in a time we have to fight. We have a president who understands this. He’s doing everything he can. We can’t do it tomorrow, but we can do everything we can. We need to give him our support. People better vote in these midterms so we can keep Congress and keep the Senate. If you do not vote, you are complicit with evil. You’re complicit with the evil of China and North Korea and Iran.

We’re living in a very, very important historical time. We have to stand with the president.

Don Ma: You’re so right, Eric. If history has proven anything, is that good truth and justice always prevails. Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure to speak with you guys. Eric, Rod, thank you very much.

Rod Martin and Eric Metaxas: Thank you. Thank you.

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NOTE: Tomorrow is yet another Israeli general election. Benjamin Netanyahu deserves Donald Trump’s endorsement, our friendship, and his own re-election. This essay, which I wrote one year ago, demonstrates a rather important part of why. It’s a story few Americans know, and every Israeli socialist hates. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
October 7, 2025

Lost in the current debate over Israel and Hamas is the utter transformation of the former over the last two decades.

For years, Israel was a Socialist backwater. A welfare case, filled with smart, hard-working people whose economic system rendered them dependent on the charity of others.

But that was before Benjamin Netanyahu.

The MIT-educated Netanyahu, a longtime friend of Donald Trump’s father Fred, believed strongly in the power of freedom and free markets to transform Israel’s future. He dreamed of the day when Israel might be the Hong Kong, Singapore, or Silicon Valley of the Middle East.

Beginning in the 2000s, he began to make it exactly that.

The Israel Test

My friend George Gilder — tech guru, father of Supply-Side Economics, and Ronald Reagan’s most-quoted living author — described this transformation in The Israel Test. In it, he posed a moral question that doubles as a growth model: When you encounter excellence — the engineer who invents, the founder who amasses a fortune by creating value — do you admire him or resent him?

Societies like the United States, Taiwan, and Israel that choose admiration unleash compounding prosperity. Societies like Gaza, or Venezuela, or Cuba, that choose envy punish their builders and slowly die.

Whatever its other virtues, mid-century Israel answered that question wrongly. It was born under siege and then cemented into a command-and-control economy by leaders who equated collectivism with survival. Ration books, price controls, and the Histadrut labor federation’s omnipresent grip held back a people famed for genius. By the late 1970s, inflation was raging, talent was emigrating, and the promise of Zion looked like it might be squandered by the leftwing ideology that had midwifed the state.

Then the answer changed. Likud’s political earthquake in 1977 broke the Labor Party’s longstanding monopoly on power. Emergency stabilization in 1985 proved reform was possible. And beginning in 2003, Benjamin Netanyahu set out to complete the transformation: to replace envy with admiration — cheerleading the success of others — in law, policy, and culture.

What followed — the rise of what has been called “the Start-Up Nation” because despite having only 9.5 million people it produces more start-ups than Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, or the UK — is not a mystery. Rather, it is the predictable fruit of freeing human capital.

From Labor to Likud

The founding generation had reasons for what they built. In many cases they were refugees, they were pioneers in a desert, and they were completely surrounded by enemies. The kibbutz was both a farm and a fortress; central planning looked like discipline and unity. The Histadrut grew into a state within the state, running factories, clinics, ports, banks, and schools. The government owned the “commanding heights,” as Lenin put it, fixing prices and rationing goods, but subsisting on a sea of foreign aid. It was egalitarian on paper and suffocating in practice.

By the mid-1970s the bill came due. Inflation spiraled into triple digits. Government and Histadrut conglomerates hoarded credit and stifled competitors. A young coder or physicist found fewer paths forward than in Boston or Silicon Valley, where many in fact went, including (for a time) IDF special forces hero Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 1977 the public said enough. Menachem Begin’s Likud, speaking for the “second Israel” — Mizrahim, religious Zionists, working-class voters long talked down to by the Socialist elite — broke Mapai’s lock on power. Begin was not yet a Thatcherite, but his victory shattered the presumption that Labor’s model was the only option.

Crisis forced a second shift. In 1985, with inflation nearing 400%, a national-unity government froze wages, cut subsidies, pegged the shekel, and reined in spending. Likud’s Stabilization Plan worked. Price stability returned.

But stabilization is not liberalization. Israel had cooled the fever without curing the disease. The state still owned too much. The banks still owned the pensions. The incentive structure still punished work and capital formation. Israel needed an architect who would rebuild the system from the foundations up, not just patch the roof.

How Netanyahu Achieved His Vision

Before he ever touched the Finance Ministry, Netanyahu had a plan. He had lived the American experience — MIT, consulting, Wall Street — and he had seen what free capital and open competition could do. He talked openly about turning Israel into a “mini-America”: a place where enterprise was celebrated, where capital markets funneled savings into risk, and where the state served citizens rather than smothering them. His speeches from the late 1990s read like a blueprint: cut marginal tax rates, privatize state assets, break monopolies, open the capital account, and treat entrepreneurs as national assets rather than necessary evils.

He took office as Finance Minister in 2003 in the teeth of the Second Intifada’s economic wreckage: collapsing tourism, fleeing investment, skyrocketing unemployment, deficits blown out. Lesser politicians reached for subsidies and slogans. Netanyahu reached for a wrench.

First, taxes. Marginal income brackets were flattened and lowered; the corporate rate fell; capital gains were rationalized. The point was not to favor the rich but to favor growth — to make the next factory, the next VC fund, the next hiring decision easier, not harder.

Second, welfare to work. The system of child allowances and transfer payments had been intended with compassion, and as in other countries, ended as a trap. For many households, rational calculation meant staying home paid better than working. Netanyahu cut allowances, tightened eligibility, and paired the change with job programs. As with Reagan in the early 1980s, the politics were brutal, but the economics worked. Employment rose, particularly among communities with historically low labor force participation.

Third, the Bachar capital-market reform. For decades, the big banks both collected household savings and lent those savings to themselves, locking retirement money into captive bank bonds. Competition was anemic. The stock market starved. Young companies went begging.

Netanyahu and his deputy, Haim Ramon, forced the banks to spin off their mutual and provident funds, birthing a modern asset-management industry. Suddenly, billions of shekels looked for returns in equities, corporate debt, and venture investments that financed a booming cohort of founders.

Fourth, privatization. El Al and Bezeq — symbols of statist pride and Socialist dysfunction — were sold. Service improved. Innovation resumed. And just as importantly, a signal went out to would-be founders: you will not have to compete with your own government.

Fifth, deregulation in the trenches: fewer permits, faster approvals, simpler import rules. Entrepreneurs began to experience the state not as a brick wall but as a set of rules they could understand and navigate.

The reaction was ferocious. The Histadrut called strikes. Editorial pages predicted social collapse. Demonstrators denounced “Bibi the butcher.” Even allies wondered whether the coalition could survive the pain. Netanyahu’s reply was clinical and consistent: “The medicine is harsh because the disease is fatal.” He promised not utopia, but a future in which work, savings, and risk would be honored and rewarded.

The results came quickly. Growth returned. Unemployment fell. Israel’s credit outlook brightened. But the deeper change was cultural. When the banks lost their grip on pensions, ordinary people became investors. When privatization ended the ministry’s role as national CEO, ministers stopped pretending they knew how to run airlines. When welfare tilted toward work, families recalculated their futures. The country’s posture shifted from defensive crouch to forward lean.

The Start-Up Nation

Netanyahu’s long prime-ministerial tenure entrenched his earlier reforms. It also translated abstract policy into felt experience. Ask an Israeli in 2011 what Capitalism looked like and he might not quote Milton Friedman — he would likely show you his phone bill. When Likud opened mobile telecom to real entry, prices collapsed and service improved. That was competition you could feel in your pocket every month.

The tech ecosystem thickened. First-time founders could hire seasoned executives who had already scaled a company or two. Military units that incubated elite technical skills spun out alumni who formed world-class cyber and data-science teams. Venture funds found abundant limited partners at home as well as abroad, because the Bachar reforms had created actual fund-management industries with mandates to seek returns. An Israeli founder no longer had to move to California to raise a Series A. He could do it in Herzliya or Tel Aviv.

Macro indicators mirrored the street-level story: inflation tame, unemployment at multi-decade lows, the shekel strong enough to annoy exporters, GDP per capita converging with and then passing G7 stalwarts.

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But those numbers are only the shadows on the wall. The true substance was and is cultural. Builders came to be admired and imitated. Wealth was no longer seen as a sin but as a driver of opportunity. Envy was preached against not just from pulpits, but from paychecks.

And any who would live peacefully could share in the rising tide.

The Snags

The transformation is real, but there is still much to be done. A candid audit is part of any serious success story. Israel faces real growing pains, and real threats.

Aside from the war, housing is the loudest. Planning monopolies and glacial approvals throttled supply just as tech-sector wages rose, pushing prices out of reach for young families. Productivity outside tech and finance lag, in part because infrastructure has not kept pace with growth. Labor-force participation remains too low among some communities. Education and skills pipelines are uneven. And the venture cycle is unforgiving: easy money can cover structural sins for a while. Hard money can expose them in a quarter.

War shocks are real. They raise risk premia, drain budgets, and pause investment committees. Yet the striking fact of the last twenty years is resilience: the machine slows, it does not stall. After the initial shock of October 7th faded, funding resumed; when exports wobbled, the domestic market picked up the slack.

That is not luck. It is what happens when an economy is wired for adaptation, and when individuals have the freedom to get ahead and invest in their own futures.

Energy: Tamar, Leviathan, and the End of Isolation

Nothing dramatizes the link between markets and security like natural gas. For half a century, Israel’s enemies tried to starve it by boycott. The Tamar discovery in 2009 and Leviathan a few years later inverted that relationship. Israel would no longer be starved. It would supply.

The economic effects are straightforward: cheaper electricity, new industrial inputs, royalties that seed a sovereign wealth fund. The strategic effects are profound. Jordan and Egypt now buy Israeli gas because physics beats propaganda. Pipelines create constituencies for normal relations. European buyers, looking to diversify away from Russian coercion, treat East-Med molecules as not just energy but security.

Equally important is how that gas was developed: not by a bloated, nationalized oil company, but by private risk-takers under a contested but durable regulatory regime. The capital flowed because the rules were legible; the gas flowed because entrepreneurs believed contracts would be honored. Capitalism — not resource nationalism — turned geology into statecraft.

Energy has also begun to knit Israel’s periphery into its core. Ports, processing facilities, and skilled jobs sprout in places that were once afterthoughts in the central-coast success story. That diffusion matters. Spreading opportunity is better and more durable than prosperity piled into a single tech corridor.

The Duty to Admire, Not Envy

Here the moral and the practical merge. Israel’s security does not float above the economy: it stands on it. Iron Dome and Iron Beam batteries are made of atoms bought with tax receipts generated by growth. R&D for lasers, interceptors, and cyber defense comes from profits the state does not confiscate and talent it does not drive away. Joint development means America no longer subsidizes like a benefactor but invests as a partner and buys as a customer.

You can measure this, crudely, in budgets and exports. But there is a subtler ledger: the decision of a 23-year-old captain to stay in Israel, start a company with his unit buddies, and hire twenty compatriots — instead of taking a one-way flight to New York or California. The decision of a world-class chip designer to return from Nvidia or Apple because he believes he can do his life’s best work in Tel Aviv or Haifa.

Those choices are moral acts as much as economic ones. People vote with their feet for polities that celebrate achievement, eschew envy, and encourage opportunity.

This is why Gilder’s Israel Test is not just a slogan but a survival strategy. A country that cheers for winners makes it possible for everyone to win. A society that blesses wealth-creation multiplies its defenders and its inventions. A nation that punishes success eventually cannot afford its own shield. It becomes a basket case dependent on charity.

The Jewish state learned this the hard way. It chose a better path — and lived.

What Must Come Next

Picture an Israel that fixes its housing choke point with American-style “by-right” approvals where infrastructure exists, and fast-track corridors where it doesn’t. Young families buy near where they work. Commutes shrink. Wages buy more life.

Picture the periphery tied to the core by high-speed rail and reliable freight. A biotech lab in Beersheba partners with a foundry in Kiryat Gat and a seed-stage fund in Jerusalem — and none of them feel like they’re operating from the edge. Productivity rises not just because of code, but because trucks, data, and people move faster.

Picture education that is unafraid of excellence: rigorous math and science in every school, entrepreneurship tracks that start in tenth grade, and civics education that explains why markets are moral — because they reward service to others. Haredi and Arab students, without surrendering identity, plug into high-value work because pathways are clear and incentives aligned. School choice becomes the norm.

Picture capital markets deepened again: pension funds with larger domestic mandates for growth equity; a second wave of Israeli limited partners who want to own more of Israeli scaling companies, not sell them prematurely for lack of capital at home.

Picture the natural gas story maturing into a full energy strategy: expanded production, resilient contracts with neighbors, and a credible framework for the next wave of technologies, all built by Israeli firms that already live at the frontier of power electronics, photonics, and control software, and all tying former enemies together as suppliers, customers, and friends.

Perhaps most of all, picture Israel’s neighbors learning the lessons that Israel has pioneered. Damascus and Beirut could become wealthy and peaceful. Gaza could become an Arabic Tel Aviv or Riviera.

The only thing standing in the way is envy, the centerpiece of Socialism and the engine of all hate. It is not without reason that the Lord our God has told us, “Thou shalt not covet.”

A New Day of Freedom

Israel chose admiration over envy and was reborn. It turned ration books into cap tables, state monopolies into competitive markets, kibbutz romance into a different kind of heroism — the builder who hires hundreds and exports resilience to the free world.

Netanyahu’s reforms were the hinge. But the door that swung open was cultural: dignity over dependency; responsibility over grievance; the pride of serving others well enough that they gladly pay you for it.

The work is not finished. No free economy’s work ever is. The temptations are familiar: to sandbag the winners, to regulate the vitality out of new industries, to smother the next Tamar or Mobileye in committees, to retreat to the false comfort of the state. We must all resist them. Keep admiration not envy at the center of both policy and pedagogy, and Israel’s future will be larger than its already astonishing present.

There is a final reason to keep faith with the capitalist transformation. The world is darker than it ought to be. It needs positive examples. A small nation that was poor, besieged, and socialist became rich, resilient, and free by blessing excellence and clearing the way for it. That example is not merely good for Israelis. It is good for everyone who hopes for a civilization where genius is thanked, not shackled; where wealth comes from service, not plunder; and where security is purchased not by tribute to tyrants, but by the prosperity of a free people.

Israel has crossed over from its Socialist nightmare into its bright new day of freedom. Its neighbors can do likewise, if they can but summon the courage to try. Will they?

The secret is simple: Admire your builders. Bless your wealth-creators. Cheer one another’s success. Reward those who take the risks that lift everyone else. Never succumb to resentment or envy.

Make that your policy, not just your opinion. If it worked in tiny, impoverished Israel, surrounded by enemies, it can work absolutely anywhere.

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NOTE: I wrote this essay eleven years ago to commemorate the 600th anniversary of one of the ten or so most important battles in human history, Henry’s triumph at Agincourt. — RDM

by Rod D. Martin
October 25, 2015

Today in 1415 on this, St. Crispin’s Day, King Henry V triumphed at Agincourt. The battle is one of the defining moments in the history of the English-speaking peoples. It is a victory like unto Marathon or Arbela; or for Christians, and certainly for the devout King Henry, a postcanonical deliverance comparable to the victory of Gideon, or to the parting of the Red Sea.

Historians speak of the First British Empire, which began in Jamestown and ended at Yorktown, and of the Second British Empire, of which India became the keystone and which died very quickly once its heart was removed.

But eight decades before Columbus and Cabot sailed to the Americas, the victory at Agincourt established an earlier, English, empire. The high point of the Hundred Years War, from the English perspective at least, it brought about the Treaty of Troyes, which settled the claims of the previous century and granted France’s throne to Henry’s heirs.

The battle itself still captivates. Four eyewitnesses wrote accounts, agreeing in the major details and leaving historians little doubt as to what took place.

Though successful, the siege of Harfleur — then the principal port city of France — had taken longer and cost more than hoped (“Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead!”). His numbers diminished to barely 6,000, many of his men sick with dysentery, Henry decided to retire to Calais and thence to England.

The French, led by an insane king and an arrogant, wicked court, had failed to assemble their forces in time to relieve Harfleur, but now stood astride Henry’s rain-soaked path. They outnumbered his single line of men-at-arms plus archers by about five to one, including cavalry the English lacked. They wanted vengeance. And they offered him two choices: give himself up as a captive for ransom, or face certain annihilation.

It is Shakespeare, of course, who has shaped our memory of these events, but his account is faithful enough. In the words of Plantagenet scholar Dan Jones, “if we read the letters the real Henry dictated...there is a stridency and grandeur to his tone that is unmatched in dictations by any of his other aristocratic captains. Shakespeare’s grown-up Hal thunders true to the spirit, if not the letter, of his real-life counterpart.”

We remember Henry’s response to the French herald Montjoy: “If we may pass, we will. If we be hindered, we shall your tawny ground with your red blood discolor . . . The sum of all our answer is but this: We would not seek a battle, as we are. Nor as we are, we say we will not shun it.” One can hear this echo, 525 years later and one month to the day after the French abandoned Paris to the Nazis, in Churchill: “We shall defend every village, every town and every city. The vast mass of London itself, fought street by street, could easily devour an entire hostile army; and we would rather see London laid in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved.”

In a rather striking departure from medieval norms but consistent with his Christian character, Henry had prohibited his men from looting, and had even executed a friend for having done so (“In our marches through the country, there [must] be nothing compelled from the villages, nothing taken but paid for, none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful language”). But by the time of Henry’s answer to Montjoy, the English army had marched 200 muddy miles on increasingly empty stomachs. They were exhausted. And they were certain of defeat by the well-rested, well-fed, well-armed French.

Even so, Henry would not yield. “If we are marked to die,” he told his beleaguered men, “we are enough to do our country loss — and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

“This day is called the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe when this day is named . . . strip his sleeve and show his scars and say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day!’ Old men forget — yet all shall be forgot, but he’ll remember with advantages what feats he did that day . . . And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by from this day to the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here — and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!”

And so trusting their fates to God despite the certainty of death, they fought. And fighting on, they won.

Scholars marvel at the magnitude of their victory. Some attempt to explain it away, but the evidence against them is overwhelming. Others attribute it to the technological advantage of the English longbow, and yet the great military historian John Keegan has shown that Harry’s archers could not have been enough.

At the outset about 6,000 English faced roughly 30,000 Frenchmen. Half an hour later, 10,000 Frenchmen lay dead. 2,000 more were prisoners, among them the marshal of France, two dukes and two counts. Indeed, more French knights were taken prisoner than the total of all English knights. Among the French dead were both the constable and the admiral of France — their commanders-in-chief — the master of longbowmen, the master of the royal household, three dukes, eight counts, 90 members of the lower nobility, and 8,400 “knights, esquires and gallant gentlemen.” It was, in Henry’s words, “a royal fellowship of death.”

And the English dead? “Edward the duke of York, the earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketley, Davy Gam, esquire; none else of name, and of all other men, but five and twenty.”

Having themselves been in the thick of the battle, the news of this astonishing deliverance reached Henry and his men only after. It moved them profoundly. The king prohibited any man from boasting of the victory “or tak[ing] praise from God which is His only.” When asked whether Henry would permit the telling of the numbers killed, he replied “Yes, but with this acknowledgement: that God here fought for us.”

In Agincourt’s aftermath lie some of history’s greatest questions. What if Henry had not died young? What if his son, the infant Henry VI, had not been a tragically weak king who lost not only France but also England? What if the disinherited French heir (the Dauphin) had accepted the settlement at Troyes and with it peace, rather than rallying his forces, fighting on for three more decades and ultimately ending the war on his own terms?

From our perspective as sons and daughters of Albion (as all Americans surely are), even the questions seem tragic. But one cannot know from what else God might have delivered all of us. Perhaps English culture and tradition would have been wiped out by the more numerous French. Perhaps serfdom would have made its way across the Channel. Perhaps there would have been no English Bill of Rights, no American Revolution.

Perhaps Virginia would today look like Haiti.

Either way, in that hour, God certainly delivered Henry, the English army and likely England itself from utter destruction. And most of a century before Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista in Spain, half a century before the last bit of the ancient Roman Empire fell to the Muslim Turks — in that same summer of 1453 in which England’s dreams in France were finally shattered — the union of France and England thus achieved offered not only lasting peace between the two but the prospect of a truly dominant European power, one which might have changed every detail of the last half millennium.

It was not to be. But like a latter day Alexander, though those who came after couldn’t keep it, Henry won it. As with Churchill later, he won it not merely against all odds but when all continued resistance seemed futile. He won it through his indomitable character and the valor to which he inspired his men. Perhaps he won it at least somewhat through technological advance and innovative tactics. But in his own estimation and that of any reasonable observer, he won it only because his Father won it for him.

Agincourt and King Harry have shaped the Anglo-American character as few things could. There are few days we should keep with as much reverence and honor as the Day of St. Crispin. And so we shall, as Henry promised, from this day to the ending of the world.

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by Stacy Robinson, Emel Akan
October 24, 2026

Alejandro Rios’s father had a decision to make: It was 1962, his family was living in the United States, and every year they traveled back to Cuba to visit extended family.

But this year was different. The island nation’s leadership had recently been overthrown by communists, and U.S.–Cuba relations were breaking down.

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Rios said his father spoke to an official at the Cuban consulate, who warned him: “This is maybe the last time you can go over there and return … but maybe you won’t be able to come back.”

Concerned he might not see his parents again, Rios’s father decided to move the family back to Cuba. It didn’t take long for them to realize something was terribly wrong, but it was too late, and they were trapped.

Amid the rise of socialism in some sections of American society, Rios and others who escaped communist rule in Cuba and Venezuela sat down with The Epoch Times in a new documentary, “Red Flag,” to detail what life was like under those regimes and to issue a warning to Americans enamored by socialist and communist ideology.

‘From Heaven to Hell’

Fidel Castro toppled Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in a communist revolution in 1959.

Ninoska Pérez Castellón said that, contrary to Hollywood film portrayals, there was no party atmosphere when the revolt broke out in Cuba. Officials were somber, and the people knew something was coming.

Her father, an official with the Batista regime, was summoned for a meeting on Dec. 31, 1958, the night before the government was overthrown. Castellón recalls her mother immediately putting his passport in his pocket and telling him: “If Batista leaves, you don’t stay. We will be fine, but don’t stay.”

“Sure enough, they get to the meeting; That’s when supposedly the American ambassador had told Batista it was better if he left,” Castellón said.

Batista fled to the Dominican Republic, and her father took a flight to New Orleans.

“And the next morning, it was like [going] from heaven to hell,” Castellón said.

A mob gathered outside her home — some were armed, and some attempted to ransack it. The rebels kept returning, searching for her father. At one point, two revolutionaries began to argue over who would take possession of the family’s car; one fatally shot the other.

Castellón said that, although she was only eight years old, she immediately understood.

“If these are the good guys and this is a revolution, something is wrong here,” she said to herself. “Sure enough, they come in a few days later, and they confiscate the house.”

Castellón is now a radio host and prominent member of the Cuban exile community in Miami.

Over the past 25 years, Venezuela’s political path has closely mirrored Cuba’s move toward authoritarianism.

Unlike Castro, however, who took power through armed revolution, Hugo Chávez was democratically elected. After previously failing to overthrow the government, Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, running on a platform of addressing poverty and government corruption.

Francisco Poleo, a media executive and journalist, said that he knows many Venezuelans, whom he now describes as “ultra-conservative,” who were willing to give Chavez a chance.

“They were extremely hopeful. … They voted for Chavez because they wanted a radical change in Venezuela,” Poleo said.

Chavez nationalized many of the country’s industries, and introduced price controls to lower the cost of goods. Those policies ran the nation’s economy into the ground, but alliances with China, Russia, and Cuba kept the regime afloat.

The Modus Operandi

The exiles said Castro and Chavez initially garnered popular support by promising change and prosperity, a tantalizing prospect for the poor who were fed up with government corruption.

But neither dictator delivered on those promises and both countries descended into far greater poverty than ever before.

“Here comes Fidel. Oh wow, rock star, right? He’s a rock star. He just shows up. He’s going to fix everything, right? Which is the modus operandi of every socialist and communist,” Rick Gonzalez, an architect in West Palm Beach, Florida, said.

Soon after the revolution, government agents arrived at his grandfather Enrique’s farm, ready with paperwork.

“Here are your bonds,” they told him, Gonzalez recalled.

“‘You need to sign them over, so that we’re going to occupy your farm. … Yeah, this is your farm, but you’re generously giving it to the government, so that we can reorganize everything in our authoritarian world that we’re creating here in this country.’ He had no choice.”

After Castro’s revolution, the new regime carried out executions by firing squad.

“The firing squad began very early in the revolution, like the first days,” Castellón recalled. Those executed were not always aware of any charges, she said, and no trial was held.

“At the beginning, they targeted Batista’s regime, but then eventually it became everybody. So it was the guy that spoke against it, the doctor that refused to do something they wanted, the attorney that wanted to defend someone,” she added.

Mario Iván Tabares grew up under the communist regime in Cuba, identified as a rising tennis star from a young age. He wanted to advance his career, but in the 1980s, government officials clipped his wings.

The regime wanted him to remain at amateur status rather than go professional and bring “glory for the country.”

“I was supposed to play like eight more tournaments, big ones, big tournaments in Europe to finish the year, and then the government says ‘no, no, you’re not allowed to do that,’” he said.

“We need you because you represent the Cuban socialists, to support our communist system,” Tabares said the officials told him. “We don’t need the money. We need the medals.”

Tabares, once a successful tennis player on the world stage, escaped his Cuban team during an international tournament in Mexico in 1994. He crossed the border in Tijuana and sought asylum in the United States. He now lives in Miami and works as a tennis instructor.

Poleo’s family had to flee, one by one, as they became targets of Venezuela’s administration. His oldest sister left first — she was an investigative reporter and was looking into the government, he said.

She fled by boat to Curaçao, and then in 2005, to Miami. His father, a former politician and newspaper owner, fled in 2008 after a comment warning Chavez he might end up like Italian fascist Benito Mussolini.

Eggs Per Month

Food scarcity and communism go hand in hand. After the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia, for example, the country was plunged into a famine that claimed the lives of between 500,000 and 1.5 million.

Even more drastic results occurred in the Soviet Union — up to 10.8 million between 1932 and 1933 — and in China — 36 million between 1958 and 1962.

“That’s the way it works,” Rios said. “For making your life hell, they have a lot of resources for that. They don’t have resources for rice, for sugar, or for food, but they have resources for control.”

In Cuba, he said, people were forced to rely on ration cards to procure food. The cards were meant to promote the idea that everyone was equal by giving everyone the same provisions.

“You have this card, and they say for this month you have three eggs per person,” Rios said. “Okay, but maybe next month it will be six eggs. ‘Oh, we’re better because we have six eggs per person!’ Can you imagine?”

His father befriended the man in charge of distributing eggs and once procured more by obtaining already-broken eggs to help feed his family.

“He felt happy because he had his ration of eggs, but he had this bunch of broken eggs,” Rios said.

“Corruption became a way of life. It’s not a political corruption. It’s a daily corruption, and you have to do it because otherwise, you won’t eat.”

Many Cubans and Venezuelans were forced to turn to the black market to get enough, the exiles told The Epoch Times.

“In Cuba everything is black market,” Tabares said.

He recounted that at times, his breakfast was a shot glass of milk so that the rest of the bottle could go to his daughter.

Rios described a meal that his family called “rooster soup.” “Rooster soup is water with brown sugar,” he said.

In Venezuela, the bachaqueros, who ran the black market, only accepted American dollars — which were also illegal and traded via the black market.

“I left 10 years ago, in 2016,” Poleo said. “It was the peak moment of this black market economy. The richest oil country in the world has basically become a state where you needed a connection to find toilet paper.”

“If you wanted milk, you needed to overpay a guy that was trafficking with milk. I mean, not with drugs, no, with milk, or toilet paper. It was insane.”

Trust Not Thy Neighbor

Gonzalez said that both countries are able to quell dissent through the use of “block captains,” citizen spies who “listen to the conversations of the neighbors when they’re on the porches outside” and reported any criticism back to the government.

“You couldn’t trust your neighbor,” Gonzalez said. A slip of the tongue over a cup of coffee could land you in trouble if you said the wrong thing or complained.

“They have people everywhere,” Rios added.

“They have people in the church. They have people in cinema. … There’s always someone from the government, listening in. Always, always.”

Parents taught their children to keep quiet in public.

“They learn it really early,” Rios said. “If you speak something against the Cuban government or whatever opinion that you have, that is not in favor of Castro and all that … let’s talk here at home, but never outside.

“You begin to have a double life,” he added.

“There’s a life, a truth, in your home where you’re protected, and then there’s the life outside, where you were afraid, and guarded,” he said.

Similar to Cuba’s surveillance system, Chavez established a system in Venezuela that turned ordinary people into the eyes and ears of the state.

The people called them “sapos,” literally toads or frogs. Poleo said these are “the snitches.”

Chavez passed a law in 2008, known as the “Sapo Law,” requiring citizens to spy on one another if the government requested it. It was repealed almost immediately, but other laws under Maduro expanded surveillance networks.

“They created this law against hate. Hate is whatever they believe is hate. … I was accused of that: treason to the motherland,” Poleo said. “That could mean anything because they believe that they are the motherland, they are the state, they are the government, the political party. Everything is the same. So if you are against them, you’re a traitor to the motherland.”

What Free Speech?

Poleo was referring to the Constitutional Law Against Hatred for Peaceful Coexistence and Tolerance, enacted by Venezuela in 2017. It prohibits various forms of hate speech, such as racism or criticisms of gender identity, but also contains a catch-all prohibition on “hatred of any other nature.”

The law also requires media outlets, upon command by the government, “to broadcast messages promoting peace, tolerance, equality, respect, and diversity,” for up to 30 minutes a week.

The policy has been criticized for its vague definitions and the stiff penalties it imposes.

“It got really, really difficult after the presidential election in 2024. People were being imprisoned for a tweet … for a WhatsApp status,” Poleo said.

In Cuba, Castellón said, Castro knew he had to shut down the free press, and he did so.

“It took him a few years, maybe a couple of years. … Some of them went to prison, and the owners of those papers, even the sons of the owners of those papers, went to prison, but the press was instrumental in controlling everything for him,” she said.

The inflow of newspapers and magazines from the U.S. dried up too.

“Communists do not accept a free press because they don’t want people telling the other side,” she said.

She came to believe that communism ultimately feeds on envy, and people accept it because they hope to acquire goods without working for them.

“And that’s a very bad combination because they’ll do anything,” she said.

As socialist and communist ideologies gain influence in the United States, Castellón and many other exiles in Florida hope their personal stories will warn those who romanticize systems based on violence, control, and deception.

“When I hear people in free countries like the United States, and they’re praising communism, I love to tell them, ‘I will pay for a one-way ticket for you to Cuba, and you can know what communism is,’” she said.

Poleo agrees.

“Don’t praise communism while you’re drinking Starbucks coffee and tweeting on your iPhone,” he said.

Gonzalez counts himself lucky. He is grateful that his parents and grandparents left Cuba soon after the revolution because they saw the dangers early.

“Getting out of a communist country or getting out of a socialist country is probably the best thing you can do,” he said. “Why would America go into that direction? Blows my mind.”

— This essay is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
October 22, 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!

Frank and I discuss:

• Why allies must be partners, not dependents

• Trump’s leverage in Ukraine and Russia’s dependence on China

• Why America desperately needs more ships and shipyards

• Anduril, SpaceX, and reforming the Pentagon’s long-broken defense procurement

• Why the Moon’s south pole could decide who controls humanity’s future

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It’s a full half-hour of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

Our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: We’re back. And when I get to say, “So is Rod Martin,” it’s a banner day here at Securing America. And this is not only a banner day in that respect, but it’s a banner day because this is the day that Rod’s new book, titled Trump’s New World Re-Order, goes on sale and in bookstores across this country, and it’s a great day for all of those reasons, and we’re delighted, as always, to have it in-house to talk about.

Rod, welcome back, my friend. Congratulations!

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

Frank Gaffney: We’re going to talk about the book, but let me just level set again for those who don’t know you as well as they should. You are, of course, a man with some background in the policy arena, working for the wonderful governor of Arkansas at the time, Mike Huckabee, now the ambassador of the United States to Israel. You’ve been quite successful in the business arena, including some time with the PayPal mafia early on, of its operations, and you also are entrepreneurial, pursuing a wonderful product called the Rod Martin Report.

Subscribe to RodMartin.org. I encourage everyone to do it. On top of all of that, you’re the chairman of the board of our Institute for the American Future as I said earlier. And, folks, it’s the outfit that makes all this possible, so please support us if you can.

Rod, let’s talk about the book. At the moment, what it feels as though is going on, rather dramatically, is a lot of new world disorder. You’ve got a different take on it, and one that’s considerably more optimistic than that prospect.

Talk us through both what you see, what you are calling attention to with your new book, as well as on that other dark side that’s out there as well.

A New American Alliance Architecture

Rod D. Martin: Well, there are always difficult times. The question is how you deal with them. In the old order that we've lived under for the last 80 or 90 years, depending, America spent blood and treasure, and other people called the shots. I mean, it's really kind of been ridiculous. We give the IMF a veto over things like currency swap facilities.

What is that? I mean, we have a veto over them, but they have a veto over us. So if we need to help an ally, whether it's the UAE or Argentina or anybody else, you know, we're told no.

Well, it’s our money, and it’s our treasury, and it’s our currency. And that clearly has a deleterious effect on our ability to maintain dollar dominance.

If you’re talking about alliances, you know, we have been expected in NATO for decades now to spend about 70 percent of the total bill of defending the alliance. Germany, not that long ago, was showing up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t bother to buy enough rifles.

Why would they need to? They have America. And so the American defense budget subsidizes the German welfare program while Germany is charging us four times the auto tariff that we were charging them.

So, you know, in these and a thousand other ways, Donald Trump has stepped in and said, no, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to help our allies: we’re always up for that. But what we’re not up for is having them act like a bunch of teenagers in our basement. They actually have to move out and get a job.

So that’s what we’re doing with the 5 percent of GDP commitment with NATO. They finally hit their 2 percent commitment. Only took them a decade, decade and a half.

And now it’s 5 percent, and that’s great. Actually, that’ll increase alliance spending by about two and a half times, which is not insignificant. And no, it won’t make them — by which I mean Europe and Canada — any kind of superpower. But it will mean they can take care of their own backyard. And only in a crisis do they need us to come in with decisive force.

We want the same thing in the Middle East. We want the same thing in East Asia. Not that we want to pull back in any way, just that we don’t want to be solely responsible for every corner of the planet when we have perfectly capable allies competing with us economically and otherwise that are freeloading on the American taxpayer. Enough is enough.

So Trump is reordering all of that. And of course, nasty things will happen. Nasty things always happen. The question, once again, is how you deal with it. And if we have strong allies who are partners, not dependents, then the United States can be the decisive factor in any crisis and thereby avoid most of them.

Certainly the crisis that is looming with China and would have surely spiraled out of control if the Biden team had continued to be in control.

Ukraine Negotiations, and Russia’s Dependence on China

Frank Gaffney: So, Rod, when you talk about defending their own backyard, the Europeans have in their backyard Russia, of course. And Russia is actively involved, as you’ve alluded to, in an invasion of Ukraine, an unbelievably costly war for both parties, but particularly for the Russians. The question of whether or not Russia is in frustration over its inability to finish off Ukraine and its pique with the Europeans who are helping prop it up, may lash out at the Europeans.

Talk about that in the context of the New World Re-Order, which you write, particularly President Trump’s efforts to clearly improve relations with the Russians, get access to their diesel fuel, for example. And otherwise, you know, signal to the Europeans that we have a preferred outcome in this exercise, namely that there is a settlement on terms that are more agreeable to Russia than the Ukrainians.

Rod D. Martin: Well, there’s a settlement on terms that are agreeable to ending the slaughter. And Volodymyr Zelensky is, in many respects, being utterly unreasonable here. If he wants to fight on to the last Ukrainian, I don’t really think that’s a good result. If he were able to actually dislodge Russia from Crimea, I think we would have seen that actually happen sometime this year.

Now, to be fair, I’m very, very proud of what the Ukrainians have achieved in terms of taking massive amounts of Russian oil refining, pumping, and even just production capacity offline.

That is the right answer, and it’s an answer that Donald Trump has enabled, because Joe Biden handcuffed Ukraine completely, preventing them from firing any attack, any missile, more than about 100, 120 miles into Russia. So he can attack immediate supply lines, he can attack immediate armored formations, but God forbid we should do any damage to the actual Russian economy! It’s Donald Trump who turned that around. It’s Donald Trump who enabled that. It’s Donald Trump who is shipping all of those new ERAMs over there.

All of that is happening because Donald Trump wants them to be able to get the best settlement they can. But along with that is, they actually have to be willing to settle. There’s no meaningful chance that Ukraine is going to be able to push Russia out of the Donbas. It’s not going to happen. And it’s been obvious that wasn’t going to happen for five years. So how many more people have to die?

And the truth is, being able to dislodge Russia from the predatory embrace of China is a good geopolitical development for everybody but China.

So there is stuff there to be done.

Frank Gaffney: Do you think that’s actually in the offing, Rod? Just to drill down on that for a minute. Do you think that weaning the Russians off of the Chinese teat, should I say, I guess, is in the cards, actually?

Rod D. Martin: Well, absolutely, because China has exploited Russia ruthlessly for the last five years after promising them, you will recall, about a week before the invasion, Xi Jinping promises “an alliance without limits.” Well, okay. When’s the Chinese army going to invade Ukraine? Still waiting. You know, when are they going to give their buddies in Russia some slack on actually buying all this petroleum and natural gas that they’ve been buying? No, none of that. They buy it at a steep discount because Russia has nowhere else to sell.

They require the Russians to pay for anything they buy from China in gold or in yuan. So they can’t use rubles. In every dealing you have with China, it doesn’t matter who you are — it doesn’t matter if you’re Venezuela, it doesn’t matter if you’re Cuba, it doesn’t matter if you’re Iran, it doesn’t matter if you’re Russia. Every dealing you have with China is predatory, and it’s on their terms. They are not interested in being anybody’s ally or friend, and the world’s starting to notice, thank God.

East Asia is certainly starting to notice. There are no real deals you can have with China except on the basis of overwhelming strength, and that’s exactly why we need our East Asian partners to stand up, as Japan is beginning to do, and actually face this threat as what it is. That, in combination with us, can contain it, and if need be, beat it. But what we were doing wasn’t working.

Frank Gaffney: That’s for sure. We have to take a short break. We’ll be right back with the author of Trump’s New World Re-Order. That would be Rod Martin. Stay tuned for much more on the other side of this very short break, including what we need to be doing to assert ourselves in this new world order on the seas. Why it’s so important. Stay tuned.

Sea Power and Rebuilding American Shipyards

Welcome back. And once again to Rod Martin, the proprietor of the RodMartin.org website, where you can find the Rod Martin Report, as well as some very important insights into how you can obtain Rod’s brand new book just on sale today. First day. That would be, as I’ve mentioned, Trump’s New World Re-Order.

One of the touchstones, clearly, of the reordering that the president is about — and one that I know you feel very strongly and very supportively, Rod — is this question of our maritime strength, specifically our naval military and power projection capabilities, which have been allowed to seriously atrophy for years, we recall some of us of a certain age, Ronald Reagan’s commitment to build with then-Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman’s considerable help, a 600-ship navy.

I don’t think we ever quite made it, but we got pretty close.

Rod D. Martin: Very close, yes.

Frank Gaffney: We are now well below 300 ships in our country. Talk to us about not only the importance of that in the abstract, but really as its centrality to the New World Re-Order that Donald Trump is pursuing.

Rod D. Martin: Well, I want to stress, none of this is in isolation. Obviously, the Institute for the American Future and RodMartin.org are very concerned about all aspects of American power. I just did a piece a couple weeks ago on the new M1E3 tank, which is awesome. And, you know, we’ve done stuff on the F-15EX and the F-35I and certainly Golden Dome, all these things. And hardly anybody’s talked about space power as much as you and I have.

But, folks, let’s get real. We are a maritime nation. We always have been. America rests on sea power. It cannot be avoided. And if you care about land power, if you care about air power, the Navy carries all of that, too.

It is absolutely essential that we have the kind of Navy that can actually patrol not just the Taiwan Strait, not just the Luzon Strait, not just the Strait of Hormuz or the Strait of Malacca. We have to have a Navy that can actually control all the chokepoints of the world.

That’s an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. And you cannot do it with 287 ships. That’s ridiculous. So, you know, at the end of the Cold War, we had 15 aircraft carriers. Now we have 11. 11 means that on your very best day, you actually have six that are available for deployment. Frequently, it’s more like five.

We do not have enough Navy. And this president gets it. This president is doing everything in his considerable power to increase American shipbuilding capacity just as rapidly as possible.

And you’re seeing that in our trade deals even because we brought in the South Koreans and the Japanese and even the Finns to help us build some of the ships we need, especially frigates and icebreakers overseas because we just don’t have the shipbuilding capacity here.

But the deals all require that those foreign shipbuilders, who haven’t let their technology atrophy — they’ve actually jumped ahead — actually have to come here and either operate or build an American shipyard, and train American workers to operate that shipyard. They can bring their people briefly, but only long enough to get our people trained. This is a good deal for them, as it is also for us. They’ll make a ton of money on it and we’ll build up American sea power.

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But we need more. We only have one nuclear-capable dock for surface combatants in the country. It’s absurd. We have just two facilities that can build nuclear submarines. That isn’t keeping up. We are absolutely at a critical point there. We have a requirement for at least two Virginia-class submarines for ourselves each year. We can actually only produce 1.2. And with the demands that we now have, both for expansion of our own Navy, for the new SSGNs, for AUKUS — because we’ve got to provide boats now to the Australians too — we’re going to need to be able to produce three of these things a year.

We can’t produce much more than one. It’s just not acceptable and it’s absolutely needless. We are 26 percent of the world’s economy and we can’t build ships. My gosh, China has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States! 230 times. That’s like the U.S. Army going up against Little House on the Prairie.

It’s ridiculous and it’s a completely self-inflicted wound, almost as though a lot of those people in the Beltway were doing their best to help China take world dominance.

Frank Gaffney: Well, this is a suspicious point of note in our book, of course, The Indictment, which talks about those enablers of the Chinese Communist Party, the so-called captured elite in this country that has helped put us in this fix.

Rod, I did want to just give you a minute or so before we have to take another break to talk about Anduril and this new shipyard in the Baltimore area that we’re told is going to be cranking out unmanned vessels in considerable quantity.

How does that fit into this overall scale?

Anduril, SpaceX, and Fixing Defense Procurement

Rod D. Martin: Unmanned vessels, which are increasingly important — both surface and undersea combatants — but also segments of those Virginia-class boats. So it radically increases the potential throughput at Newport News and at Groton. And that’s absolutely vital.

What I’d like to see is for Arsenal-2 to also be able to build Virginia-class boats. That’s not going to happen in the next four years, but that’s where it should go. And of course, Palmer Luckey is brilliant. He’s also building a facility in California that will be much more focused on the undersea drones, but also on critical components for the Virginia-class.

This is exactly what I’ve been calling for. I’ve been saying to you and others for two years, what we really need is for Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey to get together and fix defense procurement. And it’s happening.

Frank Gaffney: Praise God. And we’re going to talk more about how that might apply to the next domain of warfighting space right after this. Stay tuned.

China, Reusable Rockets, and the Space Frontier

We’re back! So is Rod Martin, the great Rod Martin I should say. The man who has helped us make the Institute for the American Future a go program, as well as so much more, including his marvelous online resource he calls the Rod Martin Report. And Rod, you feature there guest writers. Stuart Cvrk, I believe is how he pronounces his name, is a retired Navy captain, and a very, very insightful analyst of national security policy and programs, for that matter.

And you feature there on the website, the RodMartin.org website, that is, an article that he wrote about what China is doing to, well, put a fine point on it, dominate space. The options that it’s pursuing and their implications for us. Could you give us a sense of what that’s all about and how it fits again into the reordering?

Rod D. Martin: Well, one of the crucial points that Stu is making there, and it does matter, is that China doesn’t have real capital markets. For them to have a space IPO is a joke. They are claiming to have the kind of securities regulation that you can count on in the United States, when in reality, the whole thing is just another centrally planned op.

These are not real standalone companies. They are utterly dominated by the CCP, and their money’s not going to be spent the way that a public company in the United States would have to spend it. It’s just going to go to whatever the CCP wants done, regardless of profitability or shareholder value. So that’s the first warning.

But the bigger warning is that China understands, probably better than anyone in the United States except the Trump administration, just how vital space is going to be. Donald Trump created the Space Force. Now he’s creating this new United States Space Academy. He gets it. He sees this future. He understands the crucial thing that most Americans have missed, which is when you reduce the cost of anything, people demand far more of it.

So 10 years ago, the cost to send a single pound of whatever to orbit was $10,000. Well, at that price you’re not going to send a lot to orbit, period. You’re just not. Elon with Starship has brought it down, at least notionally, to about $200. You’re going to get a lot more demand, and we already do. Look at Starlink, which is amazing. Fantastic, low-latency internet service and about to be phone service as well. Well, that operates on the basis of tens of thousands of satellites that have to be replaced every couple of years.

Nobody in the world could have afforded to do anything like that just a few years ago. It’s only possible because of that reduction in the cost per pound to orbit.

Well, the Chinese are moving on that too. They are moving as fast as they can to develop true reusability, which just makes sense. I mean, you wouldn’t get on a 737 and fly home to see grandma and then scrap the plane and build a new one. That’s just nuts. And rockets shouldn’t work that way either.

So the Chinese get it. They understand there’s crucial real estate in the inner solar system and even in the Earth-Moon system that if you have it, it’s going to be the equivalent of the Spanish getting hold of the Canary Islands or Cuba back in the early 1500s. And it’s going to determine the course of the next half millennium of human civilization. So Donald Trump also gets it. We have to control that. We have to dominate it or the future will not be free.

It will be red. It will be communist. And there won’t be a thing we can do about it.

The Moon’s South Pole and the Future Balance of Power

Frank Gaffney: So let me ask you specifically, because one of the sort of leading indicators in all of this, I think, Rod, is who gets to the Moon next? And what do they do on it that will determine, quite possibly, who else gets to the Moon and what they get to do with it? And how does that, again, fit into this larger assertion of dominion by the Chinese and projection of power?

Rod D. Martin: And not just anywhere on the Moon. I mean, there is a big difference in sailing your big wooden ship and finding Virginia and sailing your big wooden ship and finding Sonora or Death Valley. You know, you can’t do a lot with that.

Okay. The south pole of the Moon has lots of water ice. That is the holy grail. It is very expensive. Even at these reduced prices, it is very expensive to move the bulk of water into space. You don’t want to be trying to do that from Earth. But if it’s already there, that’s quite another matter.

And you may think I’m just talking about, you know, drinking water or, you know, being able to flush the toilet or whatever. No, no, no. You separate it into its component parts and now you have atmosphere. You separate it into its component parts. Now you have rocket fuel. Whoever controls the south pole of the Moon controls the future. It’s just that simple.

And the Chinese...

Frank Gaffney: The future not just of space or of the Moon, but here on Earth as well. The future of all of us.

Rod D. Martin: Absolutely. Because the more space infrastructure you have, the more you’re eventually going to dominate the global economy. You’re also going to be able to build weapons that are almost unimaginable today that just give you global dominance. There’s no escaping it. And the truth of the matter is that south pole of the Moon is a relatively small prize in the grand scheme of the entire inner solar system. But it’s the crucial one without which none of that other stuff happens.

We’ve seen how they play in the South China Sea. In the South China Sea, they pretend to follow international law up to a point. And the Outer Space Treaty does kind of the same thing. Oh, you can’t own the Moon. You can’t have sovereignty over space. Okay, but if you have administration of it, if you have an exclusive zone of control, you might as well just call it sovereignty. And eventually, they always do. So it’s all a bunch of legal sleight of hand, but they are planning to own it all.

Frank Gaffney: Rod Martin, we need to talk further about what that means for all of us. It's a New World Re-Order that may not be to our liking. Keep up the great work, my friend, and all of your aspects, including the Rod Martin Report. Come back to us soon. I hope the rest of you do the same next time. Until then, you all go forth and multiply.

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by Stu Cvrk
October 21, 2026

In May, the U.S. Department of the Navy released its “Fiscal Year 2027 Shipbuilding Plan, outlining the Administration’s long-term strategy to expand fleet capacity, strengthen the maritime industrial base, and deliver a more capable, ready, and lethal naval force.” The goal is to expand the fleet from 291 to 450 vessels by 2031 through a $65.8 billion investment in shipbuilding.

This plan provides the backbone and muscle in the evolving U.S. maritime chokepoint strategy that is aimed at countering communist Chinese moves to control or disrupt various chokepoints around the world.

Let us examine the topic, and with it, the CCP’s counterstrategy.

The Theoretical Foundation for U.S. Chokepoint Strategy

Since World War II, U.S. maritime chokepoint strategy has been to secure freedom of navigation and maintain assured access through critical global sea lanes and narrow waterways — such as the Strait of Hormuz, Malacca Strait, and others — to protect U.S. and allied economic prosperity, supply chain resilience, and military mobility while deterring adversaries, with a particular focus on countering China’s moves to control or disrupt these chokepoints as leverage in great-power competition.

The intellectual godfather of this strategy is Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), an American naval officer and historian whose 1890 masterwork The Influence of Sea Power upon History became one of the most consequential strategic texts ever written. Mahan argued that national greatness derived not from land power but from control of the seas — and that control of the seas was achieved not by defending coastlines but by dominating the narrow passages through which all commerce and naval forces must flow.

Mahan’s believed that commerce is the lifeblood of modern states, and whoever can interrupt or protect the flow of trade controls the fate of nations. He further believed that naval superiority is the key instrument, and that a dominant battle fleet, concentrated rather than dispersed, can project power globally. Most importantly, he believed that chokepoints are the lever, in which a relatively small force positioned at a narrow strait or canal can hold at risk the entire commerce and military logistics of an adversary.

The Trump administration’s strategic posture, as expressed in the 2025 U.S. National Defense Strategy, is grounded in great power competition with China as the “pacing threat.” The chokepoint logic runs through it even if not always explicitly named. Key elements:

Maintaining forward bases near critical chokepoints. The U.S. has military infrastructure in Japan (covering the East China Sea and Taiwan Strait), Guam, the Philippines (renewed EDCA access), Singapore, Diego Garcia (Indian Ocean), Bahrain (Hormuz), Djibouti (Bab-el-Mandeb), and Rota/Naples (Mediterranean).

The Taiwan Strait as the decisive theater. The Trump administration has treated Taiwan as the linchpin. A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would give China control of the First Island Chain, threatening Japanese SLOCs (sea lines of communication) and giving Chinese submarines less-contested access to the Pacific. The AUKUS agreement (Australia-UK-U.S. submarines) is explicitly oriented toward this.

The Quad and Indo-Pacific alignment. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (U.S., Australia, India, Japan) is partly about sharing chokepoint surveillance and denial. India, which sits astride the northern Indian Ocean, can monitor Malacca traffic from the west; Japan and Australia cover the eastern approaches. U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s announcement of the Major Defense Cooperation Partnership (MDCP) with Indonesia on 13 April was targeted on the Strait of Malacca, through which ~80–85 percent of China’s oil imports transit. This is China’s greatest vulnerability — its strategic nightmare is the U.S. closing or threatening Malacca in a conflict.

Tariff pressure as chokepoint leverage. The Trump 2025 tariff regime, while economically controversial, has a strategic chokepoint dimension: Chinese manufacturing depends on global supply chains that transit maritime chokepoints. Economic coercion and maritime coercion are two sides of the same coin in this framework.

Denial of Chinese port access globally. Scrutiny of Chinese investments in ports from Hamburg to Piraeus to Sri Lanka is driven by awareness that commercial port access is how a future Chinese navy would sustain forward presence near the world’s chokepoints.

Execution of the U.S. chokepoint strategy involves a robust interdiction capability: the ability to threaten or physically close a strait to enemy shipping and warships, typically through naval forces, submarines, mines, and land-based missiles. This boils down to choke-and-envelop: the full Mahanian logic is not just to hold one chokepoint, but to create a global network of overlapping chokepoint control so that an adversary has no viable maritime escape route. The U.S. alliance network is explicitly designed this way.

China’s Counter-Strategy

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
October 21, 2026

Don Ma and I discuss why Russian and Chinese support has limits, how Iran’s proxies threaten global shipping, and what Trump needs from Ukraine to bring energy prices under control.

Don and I discuss:

• Why Russia and China can’t rescue Iran

• The Houthis’ role in Iran’s war strategy

• Saudi Arabia’s choice on the Abraham Accords

• MOAB (the “Mother Of All Bombs”) needs the right target to matter

• Why Trump wants Ukraine to temporarily ease energy pressure

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Our Full Discussion:

Don Ma: And we’re welcoming back Rod Martin. He’s author of the new book,

Don Ma: And joining us now to discuss this new book is Rod Martin, geopolitical analyst and founder and CEO of Martin Capital. He is also a member of the Committee on the Present Danger China and author of the book titled Trump’s New World Re-Order: Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule. So Rod, we finally meet each other in person! I’ve been speaking with you for so long. I’m really glad to have you here in the studio. How are you doing today?

Rod Martin: Doing well. It’s great to be here.

Don Ma: Okay. So let’s discuss some current events happening right now. I wanted to go to the Middle East as well as Ukraine.

Rod Martin: Well, there’s a limit. I mean, there’s no question, the blockade is incredibly effective. The land routes are difficult. To Mr. Zelensky’s credit, the Russians tried to ship some arms across the Caspian Sea recently, and Zelensky blew them up in the water. So good for him.

This, however, doesn’t negate the reality of what they’re sending to the Houthis, which is very, very real.

It also doesn’t negate the intelligence sharing. They are definitely giving Iran advantages it would not have if they were dependent on their own intelligence. That is a problem. That’s something that we need to address. But I think we can expect it to be true, at least at a low level, for the foreseeable future.

Don Ma: So this support, would you characterize it as, at any level, meaningful? Has it extended the war? Has it prolonged the Iran war?

Rod Martin: I really don’t think so. They are not receiving enough from either of those two countries to prolong things. The intelligence certainly helps them, but it only helps them so far.

Their systems are largely destroyed. It’s not that they don’t have missiles still, drones. That’s not what I’m saying. But their air defenses are gone.

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We’re not going to invade. So, you know, the protracted land war that they had planned for just isn’t going to happen. And that’s where the intelligence would be especially fruitful for them, versus, you know, attacking U.S. naval vessels, that gets them nowhere. We’ll just keep blowing up Iranian oil tankers if they do that. They’re never going to get close to a U.S. warship. So far, it has not done them a lot of good.

The Houthis, Saudi Arabia, and the Abraham Accords

Don Ma: Okay. So you brought up the Houthis earlier. What is your concern level with regard to escalation, the airport attack, all that within the Middle East region?

Rod Martin: I think the airport attack makes very clear to Pakistan and Turkey that if they want the Mecca Pact to mean anything, they’re going to actually have to give the Saudis some help. We’ll see if they do. I’m not super optimistic about that actually being meaningful.

As far as Yemen itself, the government has been successful in driving them back from control of the strait. That’s crucial.

We would be willing to help the Saudis with this problem if the Saudis would help us with a couple of things. They have been less than entirely forthcoming in the Iran conflict, even though they’ve been under attack from the Iranians repeatedly.

They also haven’t signed on to the Abraham Accords, and we absolutely want them to. And they have clearly said they want to do the nuclear power deal with Trump that they worked out. The only way that’s going to happen is if they accede to the Abraham Accords. I think they understand that’s the direction this has to go, but Trump’s pretty quid pro quo. He’s going to get what he wants for them to get what they want.

Don Ma: Where do you think these Houthi attacks are going? Do they have a goal in mind? To what degree is Iran involved? How much is Iran pulling the strings behind the scenes?

Rod Martin: Oh, highly. I mean, it’s just like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Shia militias in Iraq. There is not an armed conflict in the Middle East that isn’t armed, funded, and directed from Tehran.

Now, having said that, the Houthis do have additional aims. They would like to displace the Yemeni government in Aden. They would like to be the sole government in that country. And they would like to be able to harass global shipping going through the Red Sea. They would like those things independent of Iran, but they probably would not be threatening that shipping if Iran did not want them to.

Iran has — I don’t care what they say — they’ve completely lost control of the Strait of Hormuz. This is their backup plan.

Don Ma: Okay, so if Iran is pulling the strings, does that mean the ultimate goal here is the United States with the Houthi attacks with regard to Saudi Arabia? Like, what is the ultimate goal here?

Rod Martin: Well, the ultimate goal, in their dream world, would be to be able to control both of those straits and therefore set prices on global commerce in virtually everything, but especially oil and liquefied natural gas. That’s probably beyond their grasp.

What they would like to do in the near term that could be thought of as an ultimate goal, but that is short of that, is just wear down the American electorate.

And they believe that if Donald Trump loses the midterms, they seem to think of us as a parliamentary system. They seem to think that a Democratic House is going to be able to prevent him from doing what he wants to do. There is a very meaningful limit on the reality of that. We have coequal branches of government. The president is the commander in chief. A Democratic Congress, certainly one house of Congress, is not going to be able to change that.

MOAB: The Right Weapon…for the Right Target

Don Ma: And I did want to get your comments on what President Trump said earlier before we came on. He was talking about a bomb. It’s not a nuclear bomb, but it’s a significant bomb. Potentially, I would assume that there might be consideration, there may not be consideration as well of using this bomb on Iran. What are your overall thoughts on the situation as it develops right now?

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Rod Martin: It could be the right weapon for the right target, if we can determine what that is. It’s not an all-purpose weapon. It isn’t nuclear. It is much, much smaller than a normal nuclear weapon, but it is massive, no question about it.

It’s called MOAB for “Mother of All Bombs.” It was developed across the bay from me at Eglin Air Force Base. It’s really cool. It can do a lot of damage, but you’ve got to have the right target for it.

So, for example, when we attacked Fordow last year, MOAB would not be helpful for that because it’s not designed to penetrate hundreds of feet of rock. So, you’ve got to have the right target. But I agree, if it’s the right weapon, we should use it.

Ukraine, Starlink, and Energy Prices

Don Ma: Okay. Just one final question before we go to a commercial break, and then we’ll come back and talk about your book. I want to ask you about Ukraine. So, they’re saying sudden Starlink-Starshield restrictions have disrupted drone operations. Zelensky raised concerns about missing missile warnings as well. What is your analysis? What could explain the Starlink-Starshield situation restrictions?

Rod Martin: The president needs them to back off a little bit on diesel. It’s just that simple. He negotiated an energy ceasefire. Both sides immediately violated it, of course. Duh. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t hold.

And the reality is that we did this earlier this year in a different dimension, which was lifting sanctions for a 30-day period on Russian crude sales. That helped regulate prices and keep them under $100 a barrel. This is a temporary measure.

The president needs Zelensky to help. Zelensky doesn’t want to help. I understand why. They’ve been incredibly successful disrupting the Russian oil industry, which used to be the biggest in the world. They’ve taken 58 percent of Russia’s refining capacity and pumping stations offline. Good for them.

And by the way, Donald Trump is the one who enabled that because Joe Biden wouldn’t let them touch any of those targets. But right now, we need a little bit of payback. Mr. Zelensky needs to back off just a little bit, just briefly, to help us get prices under control.

Don Ma: Okay, fair enough. Let’s go to a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about this book right here. So stay tuned for more.

See the rest of the interview here.

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by Rod D. Martin
October 21, 2026

According to the latest report from the Census Bureau, the poverty rate just hit its lowest level in U.S. history.

Read that again.

That’s not all. America just also hit its highest real median household income in history. The Atlanta Fed’s October 20 estimate puts third-quarter growth at a strong 3.5 percent annual rate. That’s after years of Democrats promising us that 1.6 percent was “the new normal.” It’s also after barely more than a year and a half of Trump back in office.

It gets even better. Child poverty fell to just 13.4 percent, the lowest official rate ever recorded. Hispanic poverty fell to a record low 13.9 percent. Real weekly earnings for blue-collar manufacturing workers are up 4.1 percent since January 2025; construction workers’ earnings are up an even higher 5 percent.

Now add 975,000 more Americans working in just the last two months.

The household survey recorded an increase of 569,000 in August and another 406,000 in September. The unemployment headline concealed that strength: the labor force grew by more than a million over those two months, pushing unemployment from 4.1 to 4.2 percent because new American workers entered the workforce even faster than employers absorbed them.

It’s kind of a miracle. And it’s gathering steam.

Yet to hear the Enemedia — and some conservatives — talk, the exact opposite is true. To them it’s all “muh gas prices.” Which is funny since the average gas price under Joe Biden was higher than the average during Trump’s second term, even with the war.

Something is seriously amiss.

If incomes are rising faster than prices, it isn’t affordability. It certainly isn’t household wealth. The income figure measures the household in the middle. Elon Musk getting richer can’t drag it upward the way he could an average. And the $2,250 gain in 2025 alone is what remains after adjusting for higher prices.

People who spent years watching inflation eat their raises are finally getting ahead. Dismissing that isn’t showing concern for working families: it’s just myopic. And electing the people who gave you all that inflation — and promised to “skyrocket” energy prices to force everyone into an EV — isn’t even sane.

That GDP number is especially striking. Remember that much ballyhooed 1.5 percent second-quarter headline that had the pundits celebrating Trump’s “failure?” I told you then: they were looking at the wrong number. What they were seeing wasn’t a slowdown in growth but a capex boom: the private economy spending its output to buy the equipment that would create an industrial supercycle.

Now even that 1.5 percent headline has been revised away. On September 30, the government raised second-quarter growth to 2.2 percent. More importantly, private domestic demand — American consumers and private investment — grew at a 4.6 percent annual rate, stronger than either previous estimate. The part of the economy I told you to watch was doing even better than we knew.

It’s happening.

The ever-brilliant Larry Kudlow calls the burgeoning boom “the greatest story never told.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says we’ve entered the “acceleration phase,” as the tax changes and deregulation start to produce the results they were literally designed to produce.

I’ve been explaining that process since early 2025. Yet conservatives continue to buy the left’s lies.

It’s time to stop.

Working Families Are Getting Ahead

Starting with Bill Clinton, America’s ruling class told us manufacturing was gone forever. China would build; we would consume. Russia and the Middle East would supply the energy. Europe would regulate. America would borrow, import, and manage its “inevitable” decline and displacement by more dynamic powers.

Trump rejected every part of that nonsense.

The workers now getting those bigger paychecks have every reason to be glad he did. Their employers aren’t just buying equipment and building new factories: they're bidding up the price of the people who know how to use them. They’re training even more.

Nor is the capex boom ending anytime soon. Trump went out and recruited an incredible $18 trillion of investment into the United States in his first months in office. Equipment shipments have risen at an 18.9 percent annual rate in just the latest three months. And on September 28th, the President announced the largest steel plant in American history, a $15 billion titan set to begin construction in Iowa.

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The President also negotiated trade deals that pried open foreign markets to U.S. manufacturers; he also exempted foreign companies from tariffs if they begin building plants here. And as a condition of those trade deals — now finalized with countries representing 67 percent of global GDP — he forced countless countries accustomed to buying their energy from Russia and the Persian Gulf to buy it from the Gulf of America instead.

The September 30 energy agreement with South Korea, which I highlighted in my October 3 update, puts $200 billion behind that strategy. It includes $54 billion for North Slope natural gas development and a new Trans-Alaska LNG Pipeline to supply the West Coast and our East Asian allies. Up to 12,000 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent operating jobs will be created from the Alaska project alone.

The Koreans need reliable energy. We have it. Their investment would put Americans to work supplying them for decades.

The construction workers are building the plants and refineries. The roughnecks are drilling the wells. There will be years of work completing them, and much, much more work running them thereafter.

How did that happen? Trump changed the tax code, and thus the incentives for investment. His One Big Beautiful Bill made immediate business expensing permanent for equipment, and added full expensing for qualifying American production facilities. Combined with unprecedented deregulation plus the trade deals, suddenly there’s no better place to build a factory than right here.

Meanwhile, no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, and no taxes on Social Security (and what sort of obscenity is taxing Social Security anyway?!) help the bottom rung even more than the top.

“Those jobs are never coming back” was a lie, calculated to cover for (intentional) Democrat failures.

There was a time when an American family could live on one breadwinner’s blue-collar wages. That day is coming back, fast. An economy “growing” at Obama’s stultifying 1.6 percent takes nearly half a century to double. Young people can’t find jobs because they’re already taken: they’re locked out of their futures for half their lifetimes, and locked into dependency on the socialists. That is, after all, the goal.

But an economy growing at 5 percent doubles in size in just 14 years. That translates into so much hiring so fast that labor shortages have to be cured by ever-higher wages. It also translates into so much tax revenue, even at lower rates, that you don’t just reduce the deficit: you start paying off the debt, as we did for four straight years before 9/11.

Folks, this ain’t rocket science. This is the difference between Jimmy Carter’s economy and Ronald Reagan’s. It’s not like we haven’t seen this play before.

Bessent calls it “parallel prosperity.” Wall Street and Main Street can both do well at once. A profitable company is sustainable: it expands, hires people, trains them, and pays them more. An unprofitable company does none of those things. Yet the “Democratic Socialist” treats the profits that make prosperity possible as an offense, one that must be crushed in the name of “social justice.”

That’s the choice on November’s ballot.

More Production, Less Inflation

Nowhere is that point more obvious than deregulation, anathema to the Democrats. Trump has eliminated 129 regulations for every new one: there’s nothing like it in history. Which party do you think issued most of those in the first place? Not ours.

A company wants to build; it has customers waiting; it can raise the money. But then it spends years waiting for government to let it proceed. Supposedly the delay protects us. But from what is it protecting us exactly? More goods? Better jobs? The possibility that somebody might make a profit?

In the midst of the Depression, the Empire State Building was completed in just 13 months. Good luck getting a permit in even twice that time in today’s New York.

A process that makes it prohibitively expensive to produce in America sends that production somewhere else. It doesn’t abolish the need for the product. Americans still buy it, but workers in some other country collect the paychecks.

Democrats piled on regulations — and taxes — year after year, amounting to a multi-trillion-dollar burden on the U.S. economy and those pathetic “growth” rates that steal young people’s futures. Trump is rolling them back.

Leftwing economists have long fretted (as they have about global warming, and global cooling, and global overpopulation, and the Ozone hole, and “Peak Oil”, and “two weeks to flatten the curve”) that all this new production will cause inflation. But this Phillips Curve nonsense was discredited 50 years ago: the truth is exactly the opposite.

Production isn’t the enemy of price stability: it’s the means by which supply catches demand. The answer to a shortage of something Americans need is to make more of it. And if supply is plentiful, prices fall.

American factories are already producing more of what this buildout needs. Durable-goods manufacturing grew at a 3.8 percent annual rate in the third quarter; semiconductor production surged at a 28.4 percent pace. The answer to demand for more computing power is to manufacture more chips, not make Americans poorer until they stop wanting them.

The same logic applies to energy. An oil-price squeeze strengthens the case for more American supply. It doesn’t make the factories, workers, or families buying that energy the problem. Alaska’s gas will make everyone richer by bringing prices down.

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Likewise, the “expert” class assured us that we needed to lower our expectations, that a “mature economy” can only grow at a lower rate: all the dynamic gains must come from developing economies like China’s. Yet what the heck is a mature economy? If you’d asked anyone in 1900, they’d have said they had one, just before nearly everything we have was invented.

We are entering another such period, with AI and countless other new technologies promising productivity gains beyond anything we’ve ever seen. A worker with better tools can produce much more in the same hour, earning a higher wage without increasing the labor cost of each item he produces.

And like Reagan before him, President Trump has laid a foundation that sets America up to dominate the next half century.

Go Tell Our Story: The Election Is On You

So why aren’t Republicans making this case every day? And no, I don’t mean “the Republicans” in Washington. Trump’s doing more than any President before him. Congress, however flawed, has enacted much of his legislation. The leaders aren’t the problem.

We are.

Historically, the President’s party — whichever President’s party — loses the midterms. But they don’t have to. Midterms are low-turnout elections, which means “every little thing we do is magic.” No need to appeal to the middle, no need to persuade the socialists. Just talk to your own friends and physically take them to the polls.

To keep the majority, all we need is 1,000 extra votes in 20 House races — just four extra votes per precinct. Want to make a difference? You can. But that also means that if you don’t, you’re responsible.

Republicans need to stop acting like entitled children, and start taking responsibility for their neighbors and their futures. It’s time to tell our story, over and over again.

Record real household income and record-low poverty are a pretty great story to tell. So is the lowest murder rate in 126 years, a 99.9 percent reduction in illegal border crossings, or a thousand other things. Nearly a million additional Americans working in just two months is a pretty solid answer to those who told us Trump would fail. And the equipment arriving at new American factories gives us every reason to expect more.

This is nothing else but the greatest story never told.

So go and tell it.

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin
October 20, 2026

Don Ma and I discuss my new book, how Trump is dismantling the Deep State and rebuilding American power, and what it will take to make the transformation lasts.

Don and I discuss:

• Why an unelected, unfireable bureaucracy makes elections (almost) moot

• The negotiating strategy behind Trump’s seeming chaos

• Why the midterms — and 2028 & 2032 — matter for lasting reform

• Containing the CCP through American strength

• Why the race for the Moon could decide the future of Earth

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

Our Full Discussion:

Don Ma: And we’re welcoming back Rod Martin. He’s author of the new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order: Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule. So Rod, let’s talk about your book now. So you’re talking about in this book, how we’re witnessing a realignment of the American political order. What exactly is being reordered?

Rod Martin: Domestic and global. It’s really quite remarkable. It is an epochal transformation, if it lasts. And we have had that happen before in American history, the American Revolution, obviously, but the Civil War, the Depression and World War II, which have to be understood as a unit. And we have been living under the order created in the 1930s and 40s ever since.

On the domestic front, that involves what is frequently called the Deep State. That’s this permanent, unfireable, unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy that fuses legislative, executive, and judicial power in specific agencies with jurisdiction over specific subject matters.

You basically have a group of subject matter dictatorships, and they’re not susceptible to elections at all because they’re not fireable by a president, or at least they weren’t until Donald Trump’s litigation strategy got Humphrey’s Executor before the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court overturned it. That’s a 1935 decision. Two years earlier, they had overturned Chevron. What that did was it actually allowed you to appeal from an administrative law court to a real federal court, which had been prohibited for half a century.

So you’ve got to make elections matter again. You’ve got to actually get to a point where when the people decide to change their government, it actually changes because the new president can fire people and replace them. That’s crucial.

But globally, you also have an order that was built on the idea that the world had been flattened in the war, and America had to give its allies, and actually its former enemies as well, certain trade advantages, certain multilateral controls over things to allow them to resist the temptation to fall under communism. And that was great. And that worked brilliantly.

And then the Cold War ended, and we didn’t change anything. So, you know, it’s completely crazy that Germany would charge us four times our auto tariff, or India would charge us a 100 percent tariff on Harley-Davidson, or Canada would hit us with 280 percent on our dairy farmers. We don’t do any of that to them.

So Trump has rebalanced trade. He’s rebalancing our alliances. They actually have to be partners, not dependents. Germany can’t show up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t buy rifles anymore. That’s got to stop. And it really is an America First order, but it is not America Only. We want all our friends to be strong.

An Epochal Turning Point

Don Ma: Okay. And you’re comparing what we’re witnessing now to major, major turning points in American history. Can you just help us understand why this point in history currently is comparable to past turning points? Help us understand that.

Rod Martin: Well, it very much is. You know, the revolution produced an era of very limited, decentralized government, but enough central government to be able to operate, which was a difference from the Articles of Confederation era.

The Civil War made the country into one nation, which was kind of a radical idea. Before the Civil War, people spoke of “the United States are.” And then after the war, it’s “the United States is” — one coherent thing after the war.

The Depression and World War II reforged America in a technocratic way. The idea that experts should rule us, that we really shouldn’t allow elected people to have anything to do with telling an expert what to do. That’s how you get Tony Fauci. That’s how you get two years of masks and lockdowns. That’s how you get a vaccine that is just absurd. I’m sorry. Brilliant effort: good on them. But we’re going to give billions of people a vaccination that we actually haven’t conducted a clinical trial for? That’s just crazy, especially if you force it on them.

So people have lost faith in the expert class because the expert class turns out not to be that smart. And they certainly aren’t accountable.

So just here at home, you’re talking about a tremendous shift from the system of government that we have had, which I would contend is unconstitutional, for 90 years.

Abroad, just reordering our foreign relations in a way that puts the interests of the United States first is crucial because for the first time in a very long time, the people paying the bill, both financial and in blood, actually get to be considered. And we’re not just a charity case helping out this or that wayward friend. This is just a complete reordering of everything.

And again, we’re going to have to win the 2028 election to make it stick. We’re going to have to win 2032 to make it stick. I think we can. I think we will. But if we do, this is the new shape of the entire 21st century.

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The Negotiating Strategy Behind the Seeming Chaos

Don Ma: You know, there are some voices on the left who are saying that President Trump is unpredictable, sometimes perhaps using the word “chaos.” What is your response to that? Is there a governing pattern behind Trump’s policies? What’s the guiding principle?

Rod Martin: Well, that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. Honestly, everybody thinks he’s a chaos monster, which is just silly. Did you not read Art of the Deal, Art of the Comeback, Surviving at the Top? I mean, he’s been telling you his negotiating strategy since I was a teenager. And then he had the top-rated show in America for however many years. I mean, he told you what he would do.

So his negotiating strategy is always keeping his opponents off balance, constantly making them wonder what he’s going to do next, constantly asking for way more than he actually wants.

I mean, you certainly saw that with the Panama Canal. You saw that with Greenland. He got exactly what he wanted. But by making it big and bold and crazy, he sucked the oxygen out of the room. He got attention in global media and he forced them to actually confront the issue. They would not have made the deals that they made if he had gone at it the traditional way.

So no, he’s not chaotic. He has a very, very thought-out plan from beginning to end. He just gives the appearance of chaos, which helps him win. And he was good at it as a real estate developer. He’s good at it as a politician.

Dismantling the Deep State

Don Ma: And you brought up the term Deep State earlier. What is President Trump doing about the Deep State?

Rod Martin: Well, that is the heart of the litigation strategy. Overturning Humphrey’s Executor is a massive, massive deal. It’s the first time since 1935 that the president has actually been allowed to make major personnel changes in the permanent bureaucracy. That is a huge deal.

Overturning Chevron, same thing. You were prohibited from appealing a case that was ruled on by an administrative law court to a real federal court for half a century. That came in in 1984.

Trump has gone after those things partly by crafting litigation that would get us there, partly by putting the judges in place who would actually be willing to hear those cases. And so that’s part of it.

But the other part is we’re now at the lowest level of federal civilian employment since 1966. It’s really remarkable. And we’re seeing a lot of streamlining and other things.

You know, one of the stories on NTD this morning was Project Agincourt, which is just extraordinary. And part of what is encompassed in that is reducing the number of general and flag officers. We have way more generals and admirals than we need. It’s absurd. It’s ridiculously top-heavy, and it’s not at all efficient.

The procurement process is not efficient. If you actually want to rearm America, you actually have to be able to get weapons sooner than 15 years after you start a program. It’s ridiculous. Trump is fixing that. Hegseth is especially brilliant at this.

Also, our Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent — honestly, I think he’s the best Treasury Secretary we’ve ever had.

Lockdowns, Mandates, Censorship, and the Loss of Trust

Don Ma: So before Trump, or in between Trump’s first term and the second term, what did we see the Deep State do? What has been the impact of this so-called Deep State on the American way of life?

Rod Martin: Well, the Biden years are possibly the worst example of all. I mean, not that we haven’t had bad things happen before, but during the Biden years, you have the lockdowns. I mean, obviously, we had a little bit of that under Trump, but then it continues under Biden.

You have mandatory vaccination policies where I personally know a lot of senior officers in U.S. military branches that were forced to resign or get vaccinated. Okay, so career-ending if you don’t do what we say. It’s just authoritarianism. You should have bodily autonomy.

And the same party that tells you constantly, “My body, my choice,” on their favorite issues, don’t think you have a choice on anything they want you to do.

So you see these abuses, you see an expert class decide your fate without your input and without an election having anything to do with it. And that’s where I think most Americans lost trust in the expert class. I think that’s where they realize that the experts aren’t really that expert. They’re really highly credentialed by other leftists who gave them, you know, all of this position and authority. And they’re really just political hacks.

And you know what? If we’re going to have political hacks run things, we should actually elect them. And that’s the biggest change.

We spent four years seeing the opposite. We saw censorship. We saw government coercing social media to prevent any voices from being heard that government didn’t want.

How is that different from Communist China? It differed, if it differed, only in extent. And that’s where we were headed. If Kamala had won, that’s where we would be. So Trump has just dismantled that, and it’s going to be hard to bring it back.

The Midterms and Making the Changes Last

Don Ma: Okay. I’m glad you brought up China. What would happen if, after the midterms, Democrats took control of the Senate and the House in the context of China? What would you expect to happen?

Rod Martin: Senate and House is tougher. I honestly think we’re in pretty good shape in the Senate. Just race by race, I think Talarico loses. Moody’s clearly going to win. I think we’ve got a shot in Minnesota. I think we’ve got a shot in New Hampshire. I think Susan Collins wins. I think Mike Rogers wins by five in Michigan. I think we’re going to win Iowa. I feel pretty good about the Senate.

The House, odds are we lose. I mean, historically, the president’s party always loses the midterms. That’s a given. So we could win. We absolutely could. We probably won’t.

The House is going to have a very hard time preventing this president from carrying out his foreign policy with regard to China. If you lost the Senate too, it gets much messier.

Don Ma: Yeah. Well, I had a guest a couple of days ago who said it would be very beneficial for China if Democrats took control after the midterms. What would it mean also for the administrative state if Democrats took control of Congress?

Rod Martin: Makes it much harder to curtail it. There are a lot of things the president has done that are brilliant and impressive and kind of breathtaking in scope that haven’t been legislated. They’ve been done through executive order. They’ve been done through litigation.

We need some of this stuff to actually be enacted into law — not all of it, but some of it. And with a Democratic House, none of that happens. Absolutely none. So then you’re kicking off into 2029 or something. You’ve got to retake the House and you’ve got to retake the White House.

As far as the China threat, the biggest problem is that I would expect the Democrats to do what they normally do and block appropriate defense expenditures to curtail missile defense in particular, which they have been against since before I was born. And it’s just inexplicable at times. Some of the insane arguments that they have made to keep our people defenseless against Soviet and then Russian and now Chinese nuclear attack.

And the president is committed to deploying Golden Dome. That can get done in his term, but it’s going to be a lot harder if the Democrats have the House.

Trump’s China Policy Is Reagan’s Cold War Strategy

Don Ma: Okay. And I think you touched on this as well in your book, the China issue. Is China the long-term concern for the United States? Is China becoming too powerful?

Rod Martin: Absolutely. I mean, China itself is wonderful. The Chinese Communist Party is evil beyond compare.

This is a malevolent force preying on the earth, starting with its own people — who, we must recall, are still committing genocide against the Uyghurs, but long before that murdered 65 million of their own people. This is just a horrifying regime.

And them with something approaching nuclear parity, which you were talking about a little bit earlier, this blows all of the arms control calculus out of the water. It makes the world much less stable.

China with nine aircraft carriers, which is what they’re building toward. They’re going to have more submarines than we do by 2030. And no, they’re not as good as a Virginia-class boat. They’re not all nuclear. There are lots of things you can say negative about them, but quantity has a quality all its own. And Donald Trump’s taking it seriously. And the Democrats absolutely fiddled while Rome burned.

So yes, Donald Trump sees them as the geopolitical threat. They are the existential threat to freedom everywhere. And we mean to contain them sufficiently that they have to play nicely with others, that we have to trade peacefully because war just isn’t workable.

And ideally in time, the CCP collapses under its own weight as the Soviet communists did before.

Space, the Moon, and Astropolitics

Don Ma: Okay. Just one final question here. And I hope you have some good news for us, but by your assessment, since we’re talking about the title of your book, the reordering of the world, is China going to leapfrog the United States?

Rod Martin: The only way they do that is in space. Or we give the government to the Democrats for 12 more years or something stupid. But barring that, if you continue down this course, their only door out is space. I know this will sound crazy to some people, but guys, we’ve brought down the cost per pound to orbit from $10,000 to about $200.

You’re going to get a lot more space travel. You already are. Elon Musk has launched more stuff into space than all of humanity combined in all of history. No, you’re going to get a lot more stuff in space. You’re going to get a lot more people in space. And the Chinese know it perfectly well.

If they capture the lunar south pole, they have control of all of near-Earth space. That could give them an economic advantage that is overpowering. It could also give them a tremendous military advantage.

So Donald Trump is right to prioritize—and of course he created the Space Force. He’s right to put real effort into that. He’s right to try to get back to the moon first.

These things are not toys. These are not games. This is not a prestige project like in the sixties. This is the new geopolitics. Honestly, it’s astropolitics.

And I do talk about that in the book, but the truth is we’re going to talk about it a lot more and I’ll probably have a book out in a couple of years on astropolitics.

Don Ma: And then we’ll have you back on to talk about it. So let’s leave the conversation here, but I want to tell you: yesterday I actually took a day off, and then they told me you were coming today. And then I said, “Well, I’m coming to work because I want to meet you in person.” So Rod, it’s good to have you here. Thank you very much.

Rod Martin: So good to be here.

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by Rod D. Martin
October 20, 2026

For a long time, I have been sounding the alarm about America’s atrophied shipbuilding capacity. China’s now exceeds ours by 232 times. That disparity isn’t a rounding error. It’s an industrial and strategic nightmare.

The effect that necessarily has on the U.S. Navy and, more to the point, the ability to maintain U.S. naval dominance, is bleak. And inasmuch as that is the essential foundation of American power, change must happen sooner than later.

Fortunately, we have a President who gets what his four predecessors did not.

President Trump just gave Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries an opportunity to do for defense production what Elon Musk has done for the rocket launch business. On October 6, Trump announced Arsenal-2, a new submarine-component shipyard at Sparrows Point, Maryland, just outside Baltimore.

America desperately needs the ships. It also needs someone willing to challenge the procurement system that has made them so expensive and so late. Anduril, which has already demonstrated that capability with its shockingly fast development of unprecedentedly low-cost drone and missile systems, is committing $3.7 billion of private capital. The Navy’s contract, worth up to $2.9 billion, ties payment to demonstrated production. As always, Luckey puts his money where his mouth is. For once, the government actually pays for results.

The situation is grave. The Navy is required to build two new Virginia-class submarines per year just to replace retiring hulls; it actually produces 1.2, and that’s before you add in our commitment of new boats to Australia under the (exceptionally positive) AUKUS deal. It’s so bad that the Navy doesn’t even have enough torpedo tubes. Some Virginia-class submarines already under construction are behind schedule while waiting for them.

Bottlenecks of this sort are rampant in America’s defense industry, and nowhere more so than in shipbuilding. Anduril will start by filling gaps like these, working quickly toward larger assemblies that Electric Boat and Newport News can integrate into finished subs.

But Palmer Luckey represents far more than an additional supplier. He wants to build military hardware faster, cheaper, and better, using the commercial discipline that made Silicon Valley so productive and SpaceX so disruptive. Trump is giving that approach an opening in an industry where we can no longer afford business as usual.

In 2024, China accounted for more than 53 percent of global commercial shipbuilding. The United States? Just 0.1 percent. In just that one year, China’s largest state-owned shipbuilder built more commercial vessels by tonnage than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II.

America once possessed an industrial machine that built the largest navy the world has ever seen in just three years, while also creating the largest air force and supplying all the allied armies. It emerged with half the world’s GDP and went on to win the Cold War. But then Washington spent the last generation dismantling all that on the theory that “history had ended” and China was our friend.

While we collected the fanciful “peace dividend,” Beijing determined to build the yards, suppliers, and workforce needed to dominate the world.

But China doesn’t have to beat us all over the world to win. The CCP can concentrate its fleet near Taiwan. America has to defend everywhere at once. A ship protecting the Atlantic approaches can’t also screen China; one in overhaul counts on paper but not in the crunch.

As a result, America needs far more than mere parity. And to maintain its lead, it must create an industry that can not only produce enough ships — which at present it can’t — but maintain them and, in a fight, replace lost vessels fast.

We did this, with lower tech and a lot less money, in World War II. Trump gets it. But he’s the first President since the Cold War who has. And the result is a dangerous race America could actually lose.

Shaking Up the Military-Industrial Complex

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Tiffany Meier
October 19, 2026

Tiffany Meier and I discuss China’s military buildup, the procurement failures America must fix, and how my new book connects deterrence abroad with accountable government at home.

Tiffany and I discuss:

• How Pentagon procurement failures have strangled American military power

• Why China’s unprecedented naval buildup demands a serious American response

• Why AI is crucial to the next generation of warfare.

• How Trump’s strategy connects American prosperity with national security.

• My new book, and how it explains the global reordering underway.

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

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

Our Full Discussion:

Tiffany Meier: Welcome back. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warning that China could outpace the United States military in artificial intelligence and other advanced defense technologies. At the Army's annual convention in Washington Wednesday, he called for cutting Pentagon bureaucracy to buy, test, and field new technology at a faster clip in order to stay competitive with China.

Pete Hegseth (recorded remarks): “We’re in a different moment. We’ve got a near-peer adversary who’s building a military. The most historic military buildup potentially in world history. That’s not hyperbole. That’s just an objective truth. You add it with the step changes in autonomy, in robotics, in space, and AI. Whoever’s ahead now is going to get much further ahead. Whoever’s behind now is going to fall even further behind. And so investments now are going to matter, and they’re going to ripple, not just for years but for decades, across our joint force.”

Tiffany Meier: He also discussed a planned autonomous warfare command, part of his Project Agincourt initiative. The Washington Times reporting the command has an October 1, 2027 target date and needs congressional authorization for the authority Hegseth wants. Hegseth saying it could be established even sooner. Joining us now is Rod D. Martin, author of the upcoming book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule. He’s also a geopolitical analyst and the CEO and founder of Martin Capital.

Rod, thank you so much for joining us. Great to have you here in person.

Rod D. Martin: It’s great to be here.

Tiffany Meier: Now, you just heard what War Secretary Peter Hegseth had to say. What do you make of the threats posed by China’s military buildup?

Rod D. Martin: Well, first, we have to take it seriously. I don’t understand why the Biden administration wasted four years not taking it seriously. We’re not necessarily behind right now, but we’re rapidly falling behind. China is on track to have more submarines than we do by 2030. That’s extraordinary. They aren’t all fancy nuclear submarines. They’re certainly not of the quality of the Virginia class. But quantity has a quality all its own. And our ability to build is just very limited.

We’ve allowed China to exceed our ability to build ships by about 230 times. It’s absurd. The numbers are so high it’s almost hard to believe.

So Pete Hegseth is doing exactly right. The unsexy work of defense is procurement. And the Pentagon has spent decades now going, you know, having a 10-year-long program time or 15-year-long program time and then canceling the thing before we get a single unit of a ship or a plane or whatever. That’s got to stop. And what we just saw with the announcement of Anduril’s Arsenal 2 shipyard in Maryland is extraordinary.

Those guys get it. Palmer Luckey is fantastic. They can move fast. They can iterate fast. They can produce fast. That’s what we have to have.

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AI, the Navy, and Nuclear Deterrence

Tiffany Meier: And with changing warfare, there’s a whole focus on AI. The Secretary also emphasized the importance of winning the AI race. Do you think AI is the number one priority the U.S. military should focus on to maintain its edge over adversaries like China?

Rod D. Martin: Possibly not number one, but it’s right up there in the top three. I mean, we really have to rebuild our Navy. I can’t stress that enough. The first island chain is a very effective containment of the communists’ ambitions. But the truth of the matter is you have to man it. You have to defend it. And they are building the capacity to break out of it. So we have to take that seriously.

We have to take their nuclear buildup seriously. They have tripled their nuclear force in 10 years. They’re on track probably for 1,000 nuclear warheads by the end of this decade. That’s a serious threat. That completely blows a hole in anybody’s arms control calculations. And it’s something we have to take seriously.

But right there with them is AI. AI is going to determine everything from here on out. It is absolutely phenomenal what it can do. It’s probably not the Terminator. It’s probably not the Matrix. I don’t think it’s going to be rebelling anytime soon. But it absolutely is crucial technology that we have to stay at the forefront of.

The Book: The Strategy behind the Apparent Chaos

Tiffany Meier: And I want to talk about your new book now, Trump’s New World Re-Order, Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule. You describe the book as a provocative blueprint for understanding how Donald Trump is reshaping American government, global power, and the political order of the 21st century. Break it down for us. What do you mean by Trump’s New World Re-Order?

Rod D. Martin: Well, first, people have this perception of Donald Trump as kind of a chaos monster. You know, everything’s disconnected and disjointed. That isn’t the reality. The reality is that this guy has a stunningly intricate plan that takes into account all of the different dimensions of any given problem. And as the book describes, all roads kind of lead to China.

Ultimately, there is a need to defeat the communists in China in the same way that Reagan did in the Soviet Union, without war, in a peaceful fashion, but conclusive and final so that China can be free and so that the world isn’t enslaved by the communists.

So there’s that. But the book is about a lot more than that. It’s about, you know, restoring constitutional order, restoring the power of Article II so that elections matter again. We’ve had this unelected, unaccountable, unfireable Deep State since FDR. And now we’re overturning Chevron, overturning Humphrey’s Executor, taking back control of those things makes elections matter again: if you vote for this guy, you get this kind of government, if you vote for this other guy, you get a very different kind of government. That’s how it’s supposed to work, and hasn’t, for most of a century.

And likewise, our foreign policy generally has to serve American interests. That’s not to the exclusion of other people’s interests. It’s just we are actually paying in blood and treasure for the global order. We are actually paying the freight. We ought to actually make that serve the people paying for it, which is, again, the American voter, the American taxpayer.

So that is a complete sea change from what we’ve been doing since World War II.

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It is really positive, and I think it’s positive for the world. I think countries should have the right to rule themselves, not be subjugated by some multilateral organization in Brussels, or Geneva, or Beijing. And strong nations in partnership can keep the peace and prosper together.

Why It Matters to Everyday Americans

Tiffany Meier: And very quickly on that note, because some viewers might say this all feels very far removed from my everyday life. I’m not someone who’s deeply interested in, say, geopolitics or global power struggles. What would you say to them? Why should they read this book, and what should they take away from it?

Rod D. Martin: Well, first of all, it should be very encouraging to conservatives because, again, people have this chaos monster view of Donald Trump. And no, there’s actually a very intricate plan here that virtually no one has laid out, and this book really does.

The second thing is, this does cover all the things that touch on your life. And if we want good middle-class jobs, good blue-collar jobs again, manufacturing jobs, energy jobs, things that actually allow a regular guy to support a family on one income, what Donald Trump is doing makes that possible.

We were told for 35 years that those jobs are never coming back. Well, guess what? Now they are. And it’s because Donald Trump went out and recruited $18 trillion in new investment. It’s because he rebalanced our trade deals. It’s because he emphasized energy. And all of those things make for a peaceful, free order for the whole world, but certainly at home.

Tiffany Meier: And on that note, where can people find your book?

Rod D. Martin: Well, everybody should go to Amazon, but they can also go to the book’s own website, TrumpsNewWorldReorder.com. It’s available for pre-sale right now. It releases on the 20th. So if you order today, you’ll have the book within a week.

Tiffany Meier: Amazing. Well, Rod D. Martin, thank you so much for joining us.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

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by Stu Cvrk
October 19, 2026

Western financial media and Chinese state outlets alike have adopted the term “IPO” to describe the wave of public listings now underway among China’s commercial space companies — LandSpace, CAS Space, Galactic Energy, Space Pioneer, and more than a dozen others queuing for the Shanghai STAR Market and Hong Kong stock exchange. The label invites a false equivalence.

A Chinese space “IPO” is a state-directed financing mechanism. Beijing writes the admission rules around national mission, keeps a standing state presence on the cap table, and retains strategic control. It then sells the remaining downside to domestic savers.

The result is a form of fiscal laundering. Industrial policy spending moves off the sovereign balance sheet and reappears as losses for private investors. That is not capital formation.

“Initial Public Offering” is an Anglo-American term of art. A private company sells equity to the public under disclosure-based regulation, and buyers receive genuine claims on both cash flows and governance. Applying that label to the Chinese mechanism is a misnomer, and it fits a broader pattern of borrowing Western market vocabulary to dress a state project as an ordinary market event.

The timing makes the contrast stark. Beijing is sending more than 10 aerospace companies to market in the same season SpaceX executes the largest IPO in history. SpaceX concentrates wealth and control in a single founder. The Chinese model does the inverse; it diffuses risk across millions of savers while keeping control with the state. Risk is socialized, and strategic authority is not.

The result is an intentional semantic operation that borrows the legitimacy of Western capital-market language for a fundamentally state-directed financing vehicle.

Admission: The Rulebook Is Written Around the Mission

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reviews whether disclosure is adequate, not whether the business serves the national interest. Underwriters price the deal on roadshow demand.

China’s process runs through the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), with approval based on merit and mission. The proof is in the rules themselves. Beijing’s “Opinions on Establishing a Sci-Tech Growth Tier” placed commercial space under a fifth listing standard because the sector cannot meet ordinary profitability tests.

Commercial space has also appeared in the Government Work Report two years running. Rocket companies then received a bespoke “fast lane” exempting them from profit and revenue thresholds. In their place, it requires technological milestones, including a successful orbital launch using reusable rocket technology.

The decisive detail is that companies undertaking “national missions” or joining “major state-led space projects” receive priority support. Political alignment is a codified admission criterion. No Western exchange writes “serves the national mission” into its listing rulebook.

Western IPO ownership is market-determined. Founders may keep control through dual-class shares, but the underlying capital is private.

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Chinese commercial-space cap tables are different. Secondary reporting indicates provincial funds and national-champion vehicles typically hold 20 to 30 percent of post-listing equity. LandSpace’s backers include a 900 million yuan (about $123 million) investment from the National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrading Fund, a central government vehicle rather than a private limited partnership (LP). State-linked investors have also been heavily involved in later funding rounds across the sector.

The “public” float therefore sits atop a state equity floor that a Western prospectus would flag as a control and related-party risk.

Control: Shareholders Get Cash-Flow Claims, Not a Say

In a U.S. IPO, control means votes and board seats, which can be contested through proxy fights and activist campaigns. The Chinese structure offers public shareholders no comparable lever:

• The state keeps strategic oversight while shedding funding risk. The Center for Strategic and International Studies describes STAR Market listings as shifting the burden from state balance sheets to public investors while retaining oversight, as part of a toolkit of industrial policy, military-civil fusion, and strategic finance.

• Governance runs on milestone-gating, not shareholder votes. The CSRC and SSE pre-screen companies against state benchmarks tied to national goals.

• Minority holders cannot contest strategy. The “national team” investors and the licensing apparatus sit outside their reach.

Chinese public shareholders hold an economic claim, not governance authority. That is a different instrument from a U.S. common share even though both are called “equity” and sold through an “IPO.”

The U.S. purpose is capital formation and an exit for private investors. National strategic value is incidental.

Chinese market analysts describe the Chinese purpose openly. Public markets give technically credible but commercially immature rocket companies a way to keep burning capital, allowing multiple teams to survive.

One analysis calls this an industrial policy through financial markets rather than direct subsidies; the state retains strategic direction while spreading the financial risk. When a rocket company loses money, the loss falls on a diffuse investor base rather than appearing as a line item in the government budget.

That is the laundering function in practice. Citizen and institutional savings become loss-absorbing capital for state goals, with the exposure kept off the sovereign balance sheet. The investor pool is also largely captive, since STAR Market access remains difficult for foreign investors, thereby insulating pricing from outside market discipline.

Success Measured in Capability, Not Returns

The operational risks are real and visible. Chinese commercial rockets show lower reliability and higher per-mission costs than SpaceX’s flight-proven systems, and the satellite constellations lag Starlink.

LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 suffered a combustion failure in a December 2025 landing test while the company prepared its STAR Market listing. Even sympathetic analysts flag overcapacity, with four major companies and dozens of smaller ones chasing domestic contracts while warning that a high-profile post-listing failure could shake confidence.

But the state’s scorecard is different. Whether the result is a true global rival to SpaceX or a dominant national champion securing China’s sphere of influence matters little to Beijing, since either outcome meets the strategic goal.

A Western IPO has no such ambiguity. Failure to deliver shareholder returns is failure, full stop. Meanwhile, the Chinese market is a walled ecosystem, a parallel “space silk road” where Chinese rockets launch Chinese satellites for China and partner-nation customers, largely decoupled from the West.

The record supports the misnomer thesis at the mechanistic level. Admission turns on mission; ownership carries a state block; governance never passes to public holders; and the investor base underwrites state objectives. Success is judged by strategic capability rather than returns.

Whether the vocabulary is an intentional semantic operation or simply institutional habit, these are IPOs with Chinese characteristics: industrial policy by CCP design, to serve CCP ends.

— This analysis is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.

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by Michael Clary
October 18, 2026

It was simultaneously the most helpful and most controversial sermon I’d ever preached.

In the fall of 2021, Critical Race Theory (CRT) was a trending cultural topic. To ordinary Christians, this sounded like a debate topic in the community college faculty lounge. But in reality, it was a dangerous idea spreading throughout the evangelical world and leading many astray.1

So I preached a sermon about it, explaining what it is, where it came from, and why Christians should reject it. I worked hard to be objective, fair-minded, and even-handed. No mustard or angry rhetoric, just the facts.

I received more positive feedback about that sermon than any other I had ever preached. Not only the “good sermon, pastor” comments on the way out the door, but emails of gratitude, handwritten thank you cards, and lengthy letters from people I’d never met who watched it online.

At the same time, I also received a critical email from a few church leaders that accused me of “preaching politics,” though I said nothing about politicians, elections, or parties. They said this since CRT was a cultural issue being debated in the political arena. Some of these leaders were committed to a no-politics-in-the-pulpit policy, which rendered most hot-button cultural issues off-limits.

But I had a sneaking suspicion that they really meant no conservative politics in the pulpit.

A year later, that suspicion was confirmed when I preached another sermon opposing various Biden-era COVID vaccine mandates. Those mandates violated the consciences of several of my members, and our own doctrinal confession affirms liberty of conscience. Further, journalist Megan Basham had published a bombshell report called “How The Federal Government Used Evangelical Leaders To Spread Covid Propaganda” earlier that year, which documented how federal officials enlisted evangelical leaders to promote the vaccine.

Yet after that sermon, one of my leaders accused me of misusing scripture to advance a political agenda. Ironically, he wanted our church to take a politically charged position in support of vaccine mandates.

This made the issue clear to me. These leaders did not object to left-leaning political positions, only conservative ones. All these leaders have since moved on to other churches, and this is no longer an issue at my church.

You might assume that these leaders were committed leftists, but that’s not true. Their progressive sympathies came from misguided pietism, the belief that Christians should stay above-the-fray, keep their hands clean, avoid controversy, and focus their public messaging on soul-winning. By their reasoning, signaling sympathy with the left could help us reach more unbelievers with the gospel.

A recent post on X captured a similar sentiment.

Our chief aim should be to glorify God and share the Gospel with the lost! It’s that simple. Jesus never once attempted to change culture. He came to save his elect. That’s it . . . So . . . Love God. Love your wife. Love your kids. Love others. Paul never tried to change politics. Peter never tried to change politics. Nope, not even Jesus. The Christian walk is NOT about changing America. Jesus doesn’t want us getting caught up in fruitless endeavors.

That sounds quite humble and godly, doesn’t it? But if every Christian in America adopted that posture, Christians would abandon the political arena entirely. No Christians would seek public office. We would focus exclusively on our homes, families, and churches, while leaving all the school boards, sheriff’s departments, courtrooms, and city councils to be run by unbelievers.

There would be no Christians fighting for just laws and righteous leaders, because those things are “fruitless endeavors.” When Christians abandon the public square, we surrender it to whoever is willing to occupy those roles. And at present, we’re seeing growing numbers of atheists, secularists, LGBTQ activists, socialists, Hindus, and Muslims running for office — and winning.

Is Christ honored by simply letting them win?

The Myth of the Neutral Pulpit

Here’s the challenge we face in our day. As an increasing number of moral issues have been deemed “political,” the pastors who address them with clarity and conviction will be accused of preaching politics. But the pastor who avoids these issues for the sake of unity will leave his people ill-equipped regarding some of the most urgent issues of our day. And if a pastor won’t speak up because he’s afraid of being political, Satan will politicize everything until he won’t speak at all.

Political issues aren’t going away. If anything, they’re increasing, because cultural customs and mediating institutions have failed, leading to everything being politicized. As families and churches have failed to shape our common understanding of the good, the state steps in to fill the void. Political issues are moral issues, and moral issues are spiritual issues. Therefore, pastors must address them if they are to be faithful to God and helpful to their flocks.

Further, political issues are natural to what it means to be human. In modern times, political issues are collisions of fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews. In the not-too-distant past, ordinary political disagreements were about tax rates or trade policy. In our day, Democrats and Republicans cannot agree over the definition of a woman. Some believe abortion is murder; others believe it is a woman’s right.

Should pastors not provide biblical instruction on these matters? Can two church members merely “agree to disagree” about such morally urgent matters? These aren’t differences about the church’s carpet color. These are questions about nature and reality itself. A pastor who faithfully preaches Genesis 1 will end up sounding political, whether he intends to or not. Churches end up doing “at the movies” sermon series instead.

The Poison Is In the -ism

To get things moving in the right direction again, we need to recover true piety—an ancient idea that has been forgotten in our day. I distinguish true piety from pietism, which overemphasizes immaterial/spiritual realities at the expense of material/physical realities. A pietistic man might say, “Let’s focus on soul-winning and not get entangled in worldly affairs.” A truly pious man, however, can share the gospel while also being involved in the civil realm.

The problem with pietistic thinking is the presumption that “spiritual” means “non-physical.” But biblically speaking, to be “spiritual” means to be guided and motivated by the Holy Spirit, obeying God’s commands as revealed in the Bible. The truly spiritual man doesn’t limit his Christian duty to explicitly religious things, like quiet times, prayer lists, and Bible readings (all good things, by the way!), but he seeks to apply his Christian convictions to every area of his life.

The Latin word pietas described the virtue of honoring one’s obligations to God, family, and people. As the ancients understood it, true piety was considered a public virtue, where one looks upward to God, backward to one’s fathers, and forward to one’s children.

We see a good example in Nehemiah 4, where he inspires the workers in Jerusalem to take their shovels in one hand and swords in the other, calling them to “Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your homes” (Neh. 4:14). Similarly, G. K. Chesterton said we do not fight because we hate what’s in front of us, but because we love what’s behind us.2

But in modern times, piety has lost its public dimension, shrinking our Christian duties to the interior realm while dismissing public concerns as mere worldliness. This is pietism. Thus, a “pietistic” Christian thinks he is more godly by not getting involved in politics, which he dismisses as “worldly.” But in so doing, he surrenders the public square to unbelievers who have no scruples against writing their own morality into law.

Put simply, piety is good, pietism is bad, the poison is in the -ism.3

The Cost of Abandoning the Public Square

As many evangelical Christians have abandoned the public square in recent years, we are grossly underrepresented compared to our significant numbers. Although we make up roughly a quarter of the U.S. population, our bench of political leaders, judges, and public intellectuals is pretty thin. Perhaps this is because we have done what the evangelical elites told us to do: treat power as an idol and view politics as a distraction from “real” kingdom work.

That was a grave mistake. Faithfulness to God requires true piety, which means we must be more political, not less.

Some readers may raise an objection here: Christ gave the church the keys, not the sword, and any pastor who speaks out on political matters has overstepped his office. But when someone charges the pastor to “stay in his lane,” that man or woman is using the Bible to muzzle the Bible. However, if we let Scripture guide all our speech, there are at least two responses to this mistaken objection.

First, Scripture is unavoidably political, so there is no way to faithfully preach the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) and not end up addressing issues that will be considered political. I’ve heard it said that scripture speaks directly to some things and indirectly to everything else. A faithful pastor should feel free to apply the word of God to many issues that may not be directly addressed in scripture, shining the light of Scripture wherever it is helpful to do so.

Second, the so-called “political issues” of our day are actually worldview questions that will determine the future of our country. Since everything is politicized these days, the pastor who avoids addressing them is outsourcing his duty to the pundits, podcasters, and social media influencers. That isn’t faithful shepherding.

Charles Spurgeon once remarked, “I often hear it said, ‘Do not bring religion into politics.’ This is precisely where it ought to be brought, and set there in the face of all men as on a candlestick.”4 That was true in 1881, and it is still true today. Therefore, the distinction between the keys and the sword should guide how pastors speak, not whether they speak.

Five Things Pastors Should Do

To help pastors recover their prophetic voice in the political arena, I propose the following five things every pastor should do to get started.

First, Pastors Should Preach True Piety

Men of true piety are statesmen, saints who hold strong faith in God and are willing to fight for their families, churches, and communities. Their private piety is marked by a commitment to the scriptures, prayer, their families, and church life. Their public piety is marked by taking personal responsibility to assert God’s righteousness and justice in their communities and country.

In 1 Timothy 2:1–2, Paul gives helpful instruction about praying for civil leaders. He commands us to pray “for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.” When political leaders are doing their job well, it promotes conditions of peace where the Christian faith can thrive and grow. Thus, pious Christians have a stake in politics because good governance preserves our ability to fully live out our Christian convictions.

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This is no different from what the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) affirms in Article XV on the social order. It says, “All Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme in our own lives and in human society . . . Every Christian should seek to bring industry, government, and society as a whole under the sway of the principles of righteousness, truth, and brotherly love.”5

Second, Pastors Should Preach as the Conscience of Society

Pastors do this primarily by proclaiming God’s law regarding urgent issues in the culture, giving instruction to civil leaders about their duty to uphold justice and righteousness.

Regarding cultural issues, the Ten Commandments form the bedrock layer of the Bible’s teaching about right and wrong.6 Helpful expositions of God’s law can be found in several of the catechisms, such as the Heidelberg Catechism, the Westminster Larger Catechism, the Baptist Catechism, and Calvin’s Geneva Catechism. These tools are useful to equip a pastor to speak out on moral and cultural issues as each commandment is stated, its obligations and prohibitions explained, and a brief rationale provided.

For example, a pastor should not hesitate to speak against abortion as murder, because it is forbidden by the sixth commandment. A pastor should not hesitate to condemn every form of sexual sin, including pornography, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, transgenderism, and the wickedness of LGBTQ pride which celebrates sins the Bible condemns, because these are all forbidden by the seventh commandment. A pastor may speak against unjust taxation and government corruption, explaining how these are a form of theft forbidden by the eighth commandment (and anathematized as tyranny by 1 Sam. 8 — RDM). Preaching about these issues promotes the public good.

Let me offer a word of caution here. As a general rule, pastors should preach about cultural or political issues when they are relevant to the text they are preaching. Exceptions to this rule may be cultural moments of such great significance that many people expect to hear biblical instruction about it.

For example, many preachers did this after the attacks on September 11, 2001. I did this myself after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. At such times of national crisis, God’s people need their shepherds to connect the world to the Word.

But most of the time, the Word should set the agenda. The pulpit should not be turned into a weekly cultural commentary on whatever is in the news. Doing so undermines the primacy of the Word of God and makes the preacher more of a pundit and less of a prophet.

Someone might say that preaching God’s law can’t change the heart, therefore we should only preach the gospel. But again, such an objection misuses a biblical truth. Preaching God’s law is necessary to establish the reality of sin for which men must repent to be saved. God’s holy law pricks men’s consciences and orients them to what is good and right. Preaching the law alone cannot change the heart, but preaching the law is necessary to demonstrate our need for the gospel, which does change the heart. This is what Paul means by preaching the law “lawfully” (1 Tim. 1:8–11).

Not only that, but changing hearts is not the only thing Christians should care about. The moral law is the unique revelation of God’s standard of righteousness, and it is universally binding on all men. Biblical commandments govern how we treat our neighbors and should be preached, upheld, and enforced, regardless of whether or not an individual is regenerated. We have laws against murder and we punish murderers, irrespective of the state of their souls.

In this way, good laws are necessary for a virtuous citizenry, which is necessary for society to function properly. A just society will uphold the good and punish the wicked (1 Pet. 2:13–14). Deuteronomy 19:19–20 says, “You shall purge the evil from your midst. And the rest shall hear and fear, and shall never again commit any such evil among you.” Put simply, the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. And pastors should not fear preaching the whole counsel of God, laws included.

Even more, because there are Christians who hold the sword and others who need to hold the sword, they need to know what God demands. Therefore, regarding the civil magistrate, Paul calls him “God’s servant for your good” (Rom. 13:4). A “servant” needs to know what the master requires. Whose job is it to inform him? As ministers of the word, pastors are certainly responsible to instruct him (and by extension, everyone else) about the duties of the civil magistrate.

Third, Pastors Should Preach Accurately about Political Parties and their Party Platforms

Both political parties have their problems, but they are not morally equivalent. The 2024 Democratic Party Platform explicitly endorsed abortion through all nine months, transgender interventions for children, and the redefinition of civil rights law to include sexual orientation and gender identity.7 These positions are not merely different from Christianity but are actively hostile to it.

That’s not to say the Republicans are our saviors. When Republicans support evil, pastors should call them out. But the Democratic Party advocates for these evils as stated goals, while the Republican Party opposes them (at least on paper).8 The Democrats’ agenda represents civilizational suicide, and the Republicans are the only viable party standing in their way. A pastor who treats the two parties as morally equivalent for the sake of pulpit decorum is misinforming his people.

Some might object that pastors should not condemn the Democratic Party because it binds the consciences of God’s people in a matter of Christian liberty. Nonsense. Party platforms exist for a reason. They are meant to inform voters about the larger agenda they are supporting when they vote for a particular candidate of that party. Party platforms are used to recruit candidates, enforce voting patterns once in office, and form the consciences of the voters who support them.

In other words, party platforms represent a moral agenda that must be scrutinized in light of Scripture. This is not to say a pastor should tell his people who to vote for. But in 2026, it is pastoral malpractice to simply tell people “vote however you like.” To vote for the Democratic Party means giving the sword of the state to those who favor slaughtering pre-born babies and mutilating children.

Fourth, Pastors Should be Willing to Call out Public Officials for their Sins, by Name, when Necessary

Public sins require public correction. The prophet Nathan confronted King David to his face for adultery and murder (2 Sam. 12). Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar to “break off your sins by practicing righteousness” (Dan. 4:27). John the Baptist told Herod that his marriage was unlawful and he literally lost his head for it (Mark 6:18). The Apostle Paul reasoned with Governor Felix “about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment” (Acts 24:25).

Further, the public official doesn’t need to be present to hear the rebuke, because the rebuke is meant for everyone’s instruction, not just his (or hers). When Jesus made a baldly political statement insulting Herod, calling him “that fox” (Luke 13:32), Herod was not present to hear it. Jesus said it to the Pharisees in the hearing of the disciples which was recorded in Scripture for our benefit. The same principle applies in publicly denouncing the wickedness of civil leaders.

Fifth, Pastors Should Preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Calling Everyone to Repent of All their Sins, both Public and Private

The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 says, “Means and methods used for the improvement of society and the establishment of righteousness among men can be truly and permanently helpful only when they are rooted in the regeneration of the individual by the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ.”9

This sentence indicates the pursuit of two simultaneous goals: (1) the improvement of society and the establishment of righteousness, and (2) the regeneration of the individual by the saving grace of God. The pursuit of the first goal is not dependent upon completion of the second. We can and must do both at the same time. Pastors should work to improve society and establish righteousness even though men may be unconverted, and our continued preaching of the gospel is necessary to make those gains “truly and permanently helpful.” Thus, the church can assert her influence in both the public square and the prayer closet.

One Thing Pastors Should NOT Do

Even though pastors should perform the duties described above, there is one thing a pastor should NOT do. Pastors should not preach like pundits.

Let me explain.

Pastors must remember that the ultimate aim of preaching is the glory of God and the edification of the saints. Pastors often speak with a “prophetic” voice, because they are delivering an authoritative word from God to his people. The difference between a prophet and a pundit is the purpose of the message. The pundit’s primary aim is to provide political commentary on the issues of the day. The prophet’s primary aim is to speak a divine word that glorifies God and edifies his saints. This distinction must be maintained.

Most pastors are not equipped to speak authoritatively about complex policy matters, much of which isn’t relevant to the daily lives of their people anyway. If a pastor reads this essay and starts preaching about trade policy, NATO, or federal antitrust regulation, he’s missed the point. He is an ambassador for Christ, who represents the interests of God’s kingdom in the public square.

The pulpit may address cultural issues but must ultimately point people’s hearts toward God, who is sovereign over politics, cultures, nations, rulers, and future events, and to whom all men will one day give account. If his sermons sound like stump speeches, something has gone wrong. The pulpit is no place for political rants.

Here’s what concerns me. I’ve seen so-called conservative pastors use their pulpits to preach about the injustices of our society in ways that seem intended to provoke anger and resentment in their congregations. It seems their sermons are preached for their YouTube audience rather than the people in their congregation. Right-wing pastors may angrily vent their frustrations about the progressive left in ways that encourage their people to sinfully indulge their grievances, hatred, and resentment.

To be sure, young people (and older ones, too) have legitimate reasons to be angry about what the left is doing to our country. They are frustrated they can’t find a woman to marry who isn’t a closet feminist. They can’t afford to buy a home. Gas is too expensive. Scarce job prospects are going to illegal aliens. Young white men have been told their whole lives that they are racist, sexist, and evil, and that they deserve all these hardships and more.

And yet, should pastors fan these smoldering embers of frustration into an inferno of rage? No!

Jesus has a name for men who do these things: hirelings. Hirelings are those who “care nothing for the sheep” (John 10:13). They are more interested in growing their audience than shepherding the souls of the saints entrusted to their care. Every pastor must give account for the flock under his charge (Heb. 13:17). No pastor is called to shepherd the whole internet.

Pastors should preach about cultural issues because God’s people need biblical guidance to navigate the crazy times in which we live. Pastors should understand their plight and lead them to respond righteously, even if it be righteous anger. Scripture tells us to “be angry and do not sin” (Eph. 4:26) and that the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God (Jas. 1:20).

It is easy to indulge the flesh by nursing resentment and anger, but it is hard to teach people to channel their legitimate anger in productive, God-honoring ways, such as lobbying their representatives or even running for office themselves. Pastors must preach about political issues as they are relevant to their people, but they must never subordinate God’s kingdom to politics and culture. After all, Jesus himself taught us to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt. 6:33).

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Ultimately, every pastor is a man under a divine charge (2 Tim. 4:1). He must preach the law of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the hope of eternal life that awaits us. Our conservative politics must ultimately flow from our allegiance to Christ. We must answer to him for how we lived as Christians, not merely as conservatives. We fight for our families, our church, our communities, and our homeland because Christ calls us to, not merely because it aligns with our conservative politics.

Conclusion

Looking back, that CRT sermon was an important inflection point in my ministry. It exposed a fault line in my church over what people expected from the pulpit. The encouraging letters and cards that came afterward all shared a similar theme: “This was helpful.”

Ordinary Christians hear about political issues all week. They are bombarded with leftist propaganda in the workplace, on social media, on the news, and in the classroom. Some of them didn’t even have categories for how to think about it. They just had a vague feeling that something was “off.”

But when I preached about it, it clicked. And more than that, it showed them that they could find answers in God’s all-sufficient word. I gave them biblical categories and explicit texts to help them navigate a confusing issue, and by God’s grace it built their most holy faith. But I am not alone.

Sooner or later, every pastor will face an inflection point like that, and when he speaks up, he will probably face the same problems I did. Some people will feel like someone finally turned on the light, and they’ll see the world more clearly. Others, however, will not like it at all. They will accuse him of being political or divisive.

The faithful pastor will do it anyway, because even though their responses are very different, he is helping them both. He gives a light to the first group to see the world better. And he brings the disagreement of the second group into the light where it can be dealt with openly.

In the end, God sees. And as Peter said to pastors, “When the chief Shepherd appears, [he] will receive the unfading crown of glory” (1 Pet. 5:4).

— Michael Clary is the Lead Pastor of Christ the King Church in Cincinnati. This article first appeared at Christ Over All, which you should follow. His latest book, Loser Theology: Why the Weak Will Not Inherit the Earth is now available.

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by Mark Tapscott
October 17, 2026

“Demographics are destiny” was an enduring maxim of American politics for decades after election analyst Richard Scammon and political writer Ben Wattenberg coined the phrase in 1970 with their widely read electoral analysis, The Real Majority.

Today, 56 years later, the maxim is heard less frequently, but author Rod Martin gives it an urgent new relevance with his forthcoming book Trump’s New World Re-Order: Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule, published this month by Odysseus Books.

I say “urgent” because Martin, an early PayPal adviser and former Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Executive Committee officer, who now is emerging among the nation’s pre-eminent futurist sages, marshals a persuasive case for the proposition that our nation is heading for a massive political, economic, and cultural realignment that will result in a generational majority, the heart of which is the MAGA-fied Christian, conservative, populist Republican Party.

That realignment is already advancing beyond its formative stage (see “Over-Confident Democrats May be Headed for a Blue Wave Flop in November”) and looks to explode into the national consciousness in the wake of the 2030 census. There are even strong indications throughout Martin’s 326 pages that this historic realignment could arrive as an electoral shock wave as soon as the 2028 presidential contest.

It’s impossible to lay out the entire case presented by Martin in this short space, so let’s focus on key demographic factors he identifies as powerfully reshaping the nation’s political destiny, starting with “The Democrats’ Collapsing Map,” described in Chapter 29.

“For decades, Democrats have been protected by a map that inflated their strength. Racial gerrymanders spotted them dozens of deliberately non-competitive seats. Illegal aliens padded the population counts — and thus both House seats and electoral votes — of states their own citizens are fleeing,” Martin writes.

“On top of that, the 2020 Census shorted red states and inflated blue ones. That’s three huge, systemic cheats that are cracking all at once. And it gets even worse: America continues to move south, west, and right. The 2030 Census is going to be ugly for the blue states,” he continues.

For those who don’t recall, Martin reminds us that “the Census Bureau’s own post-enumeration survey found that it had significantly undercounted Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. It also significantly overcounted Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Utah.”

That undercounting, which the Census Bureau refused to repair, shifted 15 House seats and 16 Electoral College votes from the GOP column to the Democrats, according to Martin, citing Seth Keshel.

This is a key point — population counts, not the color of the population’s skin, determine who is gaining and losing House seats and thus also Electoral College votes. That is why people and businesses fleeing California, New York, and other blue states and taking up residence in Texas, Florida, and other red states, combined with the Supreme Court’s Callais decision earlier this year outlawing racial gerrymandering of congressional districts, are nothing short of electoral catastrophes for the Democrats.

This is why Democrats are presently obsessed with, among other things, packing the Supreme Court to destroy its current Trump-appointed 6-3/5-4 conservative majority. It’s not because there is manifest financial corruption among some of the justices, or that any of them are too cozy with judicial lobbyists. It’s that Democrats want to pack the court with a dozen of their own appointees and forever end the current lineup.

It’s also nothing to do with voting rights. As Martin observes, Democrats wail “that Callais is a ‘threat to voting rights’ and ‘Jim Crow 2.0.’ That’s not true, and it’s not why they’re upset: The decision is a powerful threat to Democrat power. They can’t admit that.”

“So, everything has to be ‘voter suppression.’ Voter ID is ‘voter suppression.’ Cleaning voter rolls is ‘voter suppression.’ Requiring citizenship is ‘voter suppression.’ Ending racial gerrymanders is ‘voter suppression.’ Refusing to count non-citizens for representation is ‘voter suppression.’” But if everything is voter suppression, then at a certain point, nothing is.

The Democrats’ extraordinarily well-funded lawfare campaign to nullify Callais has partially succeeded, maybe even enough to pare back, for now, what initially looked like a huge GOP gain based on mid-decade redistricting. Odds are the lawfare strategists will find a drastically effective new hook for their challenges, but that will almost certainly be too late to reverse the continuing realignment.

What lawfare counter-offensive cannot do is reverse the flow of people towing U-Hauls with all of their belongings, escaping blue states for new, more prosperous homes in freer red states.

“They left high taxes, collapsing schools, crime, COVID authoritarianism, housing insanity, energy madness, sanctuary-city chaos, and the suffocating contempt of ruling classes that despise the people they govern,” Martin writes. “They moved to Florida. They moved to Texas. They moved to Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Idaho, Utah, and Arizona. They moved for jobs, homes, churches, safety, schools, taxes, dignity, and opportunity. And when they moved, they took power with them.”

The magnitude of this population shift is not yet fully developed and is certainly not yet reflected in census-based redistricting, according to Martin:

“From 2020 to 2025, Texas gained more than 2.56 million people. Florida gained more than 1.92 million. North Carolina gained more than 756,000. Georgia gained nearly 589,000. Arizona, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and Washington all grew substantially as well.

“Meanwhile, the old Blue pillars still finished underwater or badly lagged the Red-state boom. New York lost more than 201,000 people. California lost more than 200,000. Illinois lost more than 102,000. Even DC, the nerve center of the Deep State, lost population.”

The problem for them is that the last thing Democrats are willing to do is reverse the economically, socially, and culturally devastating policies they’ve imposed so deeply in those shrinking blue states. If anything, especially in response to the insurgency mounted by the Democratic socialist alliance in the 2026 campaign primaries, leading Democrats are doubling down on those policies.

Martin paints a vivid picture of the coming electoral consequences for Democrats: “Population becomes House seats. House seats become electoral votes. Electoral votes become presidential power. Tax base becomes influence. Businesses become donors. Families become communities. Churches, workers, retirees, entrepreneurs, tradesmen, and young parents become the foundation of a different America. This is why the 2030 Census matters so much.”

“It will not merely count people,” he continues. “It will count consequences, the consequences of Democrat rule. It will count the refugees from California. It will count the businesses that fled New York. It will count the families who escaped Illinois. It will count the voters who were promised a socialist paradise, looked around at the wreckage, and moved to Florida. The Democrats thought they had built an emerging majority.”

“What they actually built was an exodus.” And that, Martin contends, is why “the map is turning red because Democrats made blue America unlivable.”

Is this realignment inevitable? Of course not. But the roots it is already putting down are impressive. Consider Martin’s analysis of young white men, long among the Democrats’ most reliable voting blocs.

“Young men increasingly see the Democratic Party as hostile to their very existence. They hear contempt in its rhetoric, misandry in its academic moralizing, and economic ruin in its policies. And they are turning out, or turning against it,” Martin tells us.

And it’s not just young white men, he notes.

“Among nonwhite young men under 30, [former Vice President Kamala] Harris suffered dramatic erosion [in the 2024 presidential election]. She failed to win majority support among Hispanic men under 45, and Black men under 35 voted Republican at their highest rate since 1964, nearly 27 percent, according to Pew’s post-election analysis.”

And speaking of young men, Martin marshals further evidence of their central importance. In an illuminating chapter on the gathering revival of Christianity in this country, he points to the Gallup Poll, which found “a remarkable shift among young men ages 18 to 29. In 2024-2025, 42 percent of young men said religion is ‘very important’ in their lives, up from 28 percent just two years earlier.”

By contrast, young women showed a flat line in terms of religious interest and participation. Martin contends that it’s difficult to understate the importance of this trend. “Let’s put that in perspective. For the first time in 300 years, among young adults aged 18 to 24, the gender gap in religiosity has flipped. Historically, women have long been 15 to 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,” Martin notes. “So has education. So has Human Resources. 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.”

As he emphasized, “Young men 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,” Martin continued. “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.”

And they aren’t the only Americans listening.

— Mark Tapscott is Senior Congressional Analyst at The Washington Stand, where this analysis first appeared, and former Executive Editor of the Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner. You can and should follow him at his Substack, Mark Tapscott’s Copy Desk.

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NOTE: I am happy to note that General Yoav Gallant, former Israeli Defense Minister, joins us to provide this analysis. — RDM

by General Yoav Gallant
October 16, 2026

Heading into the midterms, almost every American politician asked about Israel faces the same question: Should the United States continue aid to Israel? Or should it be cut, conditioned, or used as leverage to advance American priorities?

This question comes amid rumors that a forthcoming U.S.-Israel memorandum of understanding will curb U.S. aid to Israel.

No matter where you fall on this issue, almost everyone seems to agree on the premise that American support for Israel is a donation, and that the only remaining question is how generous the benefactor should be.

But that premise is wrong. It has been wrong for a long time. And because it is wrong, the debate built on top of it misrepresents to the American people what their money has actually been doing for the past half-century.

I served as Israel’s minister of defense during the most difficult period in our modern history: the seven-front war that began on October 7, 2023. In that first year of war, I sat across the table from American counterparts to discuss our relationship. And I watched, on the battlefield, what American and Israeli capabilities look like when they are combined against a common enemy.

Here is what the U.S.-Israel relationship actually is — and what it is not.

Under the current memorandum of understanding between the two countries, the United States provides Israel $3.8 billion annually, of which $3.3 billion is foreign military financing (FMF) and $500 million is cooperative missile defense. American political discourse treats this as foreign aid, grouping it with disaster relief and humanitarian assistance and calling it a subsidy or a gift. The description misidentifies the transaction.

What Does U.S. Aid Buy?

Foreign military financing is not merely a transfer of money to Israel. It is a defense procurement arrangement under which Israel receives the dollars on paper and then must spend them on American-made defense equipment, produced on American soil, by American workers, in American congressional districts. By 2028, nearly every FMF dollar will be required to be spent in the United States. The checks are written in Jerusalem, but the jobs are in Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, Arizona, and Connecticut.

This is an investment in American industrial capability, denominated in American manufacturing output. Investments are measured by their return, and the return on this one is well documented.

When American dollars pay for F-15s, F-35s, and the other U.S.-made systems that Israel buys, Israel’s own defense budget is freed up for homegrown research and development of Israeli technology that Americans benefit from. This “aid” does not simply transfer money. It allows Israel to invest its own resources in domestic R&D at a scale no other ally can match, with the urgency of a country that has continuously stood under fire for nearly 80 years. No other Western country has had to accumulate that kind of combat experience over that span of time.

As a result, the systems that come out of that R&D process get tested under combat conditions. By the time they mature, they have been validated against the most demanding threat environments in the world. Israel then gives American forces finished products, ready for deployment.

This directly benefits the United States. For example:

Trophy, the active protection system now fielded on American Abrams tanks across multiple armored brigades, was developed in Israel using Israeli resources, combat-proven on Israeli Merkava tanks, and only then procured by the U.S. Army after American commanders concluded no equivalent American system existed.

The helmet-mounted display that defines the F-35’s pilot interface, supplied through a joint venture between Israel’s Elbit Systems and the American firm Collins Aerospace, equips every F-35 produced anywhere in the world. During both the June 2025 and February 2026 operations against Iran, Israeli air defenses helped protect American bases across the Gulf, and Israeli intelligence and electronic warfare contributed to combined operations that would otherwise have required additional American deployments.

The American taxpayer rarely hears about these returns, because the political debate is conducted at the level of the headline number. But U.S. aid to Israel is not charity. American dollars flow into American factories; American assistance frees Israeli capital for innovation; and American forces eventually receive Israeli-developed capabilities refined in real combat.

In short, American dollars are paying for R&D, from one of the greatest tech centers on Earth.

Not Aid: An Investment

If you are still not convinced this is a good investment, set the U.S. government aside for a moment and ask the question any private investor would ask: Would you invest in Israel right now?

If you look at public data, the answer is obvious. In 2025, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange’s flagship index rose roughly 50 percent, after rising almost 30 percent in 2024. It has been the best-performing major stock market in the world for two consecutive years. Foreign institutional holdings in Tel Aviv equities have reached a record $19 billion, more than double the prewar level. In March, Google paid $32 billion for a single Israeli cybersecurity company, the largest acquisition in its history.

In 2020, Nvidia paid $6.9 billion for an Israeli technology firm called Mellanox, a specialist in high-speed networking. That acquisition cost roughly 1.8 times the total amount of money the United States transfers to Israel annually. But it paid off: Mellanox’s technology became instrumental to the entire AI data center revolution, while Nvidia’s networking division generated nearly $11 billion in revenue in a single recent quarter, exceeding the entire purchase price. Over the same period, Nvidia’s market capitalization rose from $93 billion to more than $5 trillion.

This is one American company making one investment in one Israeli company. The monetary value of the bet was equivalent to more than a year of American aid to Israel. The returns reshaped an industry.

All of this happened while Israel has faced multifront wars, European arms embargoes, credit-rating downgrades, and the most sustained international campaign to diplomatically isolate it in a generation. But capital does not move with slogans; it moves with facts. Every major institutional investor in the world, looking at the same evidence available to Washington, is increasing its allocation to Israel. Washington is the only one debating an exit.

There’s no denying that $3.8 billion is a significant amount of money, and the security assistance Israel receives from the United States matters to Israel. But the budgetary share has changed. In the past, U.S. aid was a significant share of Israeli GDP. Today, measured against an Israeli economy approaching $720 billion, it represents about half a percent. The Israeli shekel appreciated 14 percent against the dollar in 2025 alone, its strongest level in three decades. Yes, the aid still matters in budgetary terms, but the relative share is much smaller than it once was. Meanwhile, the shared benefit, what each country gains from the partnership, has grown only more important.

Can the Deal Be Made Better? Yes.

As I’ve long argued, the time has come to update the system.

The original U.S.-Israel relationship was between a global superpower and a small, determined country at the start of its journey. Today, Israel is still small. But it is also a defense partner that fights alongside American forces, an arms exporter to dozens of allied nations, and a creator of technologies that the whole world buys. Israeli defense exports reached $14.8 billion in 2024 — their fourth consecutive record year — placing the country among the top 10 arms exporters in the world.

This is no longer the relationship the original aid framework was designed to manage.

American security assistance to Israel is, in effect, already an investment in joint developments. I proposed formalizing this evolution when I was Israel’s minister of defense, and I am proposing it again now. Here’s what it would look like:

Over the next quarter-century, U.S. military aid to Israel should be gradually reduced, while clearly labeled joint investment in development is gradually increased, culminating in a complete shift to an investment-based model by 2048. What is today an annual budget expense should instead be viewed as a long-term national asset. Instead of measuring success in dollars transferred, we should measure it in companies built, technologies exported, jobs created, and deterrence sustained.

The American public deserves a true picture of this relationship. They should not be told that an investment which has built American factories, fielded American capabilities, and protected American troops is a favor done to someone else.

The battlefield says the partnership works. American industry says the partnership works. Capital markets say the partnership works. Every investor with access to the facts is committing more money to Israel, not less.

The question is not whether to continue. The question is how to shift the way we talk about the relationship, to reflect what the evidence has been showing the world for years.

— General Yoav Gallant is the former Minister of Defense of the State of Israel and a decorated Israel Defense Forces commander. You may follow him on his Substack, “The Defense Memo”.

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Full Transcript Below:

by Rod D. Martin and Stephen Gardner
October 15, 2026

My latest interview on The Stephen Gardner Show. Sign up NOW for Stephen’s YouTube channel and don’t miss a single episode! 2,120,000+ subscribers can’t be wrong!

In this episode:

• Twenty House races — and just four votes per precinct — will decide the majority

• Why Republicans probably keep the Senate

• The choice on the ballot: freedom vs. tyranny

• Democrat welfare fraud: feature, not a bug

• PLUS: The plan behind my new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order

It’s 18 minutes you don’t want to miss. Watch and share!

Our Full Discussion:

Stephen Gardner: Today, I am joined by Rod Martin to help me go through some of the biggest news stories, as well as what’s going on between now and the election. Rod, thank you for coming back on.

Rod D. Martin: So good to be here.

Stephen Gardner: Let me ask you this. President Trump, he’s not on the ballot, but he knows the importance of keeping the majorities. This is an 80-year-old man that does not stop working. He is literally wearing himself out in service to his country. He’s going to hit 35 cities in 32 days. Do you think all of this effort to get out there, show his voters that he is out working like a dog for them, do you think that is going to have a positive impact on the outcome of the midterms?

Rod D. Martin: I do. It’s up to us. I mean, he’s doing his part. I don’t know how he could do more. We have to do our part. And the math is really simple. You know very well, midterms are low-turnout elections. The drop-off between the percentage of voters in 2020 and the percentage of voters in 2022 was about a third. So you’ve got these really low turnout elections. And gee, that means I can do something about it that matters. That means what I do is really meaningful.

So if we get out there and we tell our story, we actually tell people, look, this is what’s really happening. Give it a minute. Stay the course. In a year, the boom is just going to be undeniable. It’s just going to be unbelievable in the same way as the transition from 1983 to 1984.

You know, you still had a lot of economic doldrums going into ‘83. And then all that Reagan magic kicks in. And by ‘84, he’s winning 49 states. Well, it would have been convenient if this midterm election was next year rather than this year, but it just didn’t work out that way.

So we’ve got to go do the work. We’ve got to talk to people. The president’s doing his part. We’ve got to do ours. We’re citizens. We have agency. We have a stake in our futures and our children’s futures. We’ve got to act like it.

And that means not just talk to people, but put them in your car and take them to the polls. No matter how high gas is, you can afford that. And I guarantee you, when the Democrats get control of things, you won’t be able to afford to do that. So it’s worth fighting for. Now...

The House Arithmetic and Senate Battlegrounds

Stephen Gardner: I’m sure you’re watching the different polling. Every day, I kind of feel a little schizophrenic. It’s like, oh my gosh, we’ve made gains. And then the next day it’s like, well, we might lose. Where are you seeing things going? Do you think that we have a chance of losing both houses or keeping one or keeping both? Where do you sit as you research it?

Rod D. Martin: The chances of losing the Senate, I think, are pretty slim. It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s very likely. The chances of losing the House are historically pretty high. But here’s the bottom line on that. If you look at what we need to win the House, 20 key House races, turning out a thousand more conservative voters each wins, period.

Just a thousand more voters in just 20 races out of 435. It’s nothing. And it works out when you do the math to about four voters per precinct. Well, I can put four voters in my car. That is just not a big deal.

All of us can take responsibility for that. So no, I think our chances are good. I also look at these things, you know, state by state. I think, well, first of all, we’re in the margin of error in Michigan. If we pick up Michigan, that’s a really big deal. We may lose Whatley’s race in North Carolina because I just think he’s running a terrible campaign. Good guy. He’d be a great senator, but you know, he ought to fire his entire campaign staff. I don’t know what they’re doing. In Iowa, I think we’re going to pull that out.

The only really solid poll we have of likely voters in that race is Emerson, and they have her up five. So I feel pretty good about that. Susan Collins has been declared dead every single race she’s ever won.

I think she pulls that out. I think Sununu pulls out New Hampshire. I think we’ve got a really good shot there. Jon Ossoff probably wins in Georgia, but he doesn’t have to. It’s absolutely possible to win that. And then you get into stuff like here in Florida. I mean, this is going to be a blowout. Ashley Moody’s going to win that by a stunning number.

But Texas, I just don’t believe that “God is nonbinary” guy who wants to chemically castrate our children and doesn’t eat meat is going to be the next senator from Texas. I just don’t buy that.

And there is a very prominent citizen of Texas named Elon Musk who has said he’s going to spend about 50 to 200 million dollars to make sure that Paxton’s message is just splattered all over all of their expensive media markets. And of course, the president’s playing in that too.

So I think Paxton will be properly funded, which is rare for him. He’s a terrible fundraiser, but he’ll be a great senator. And I think he will be our senator. So all things considered, can we win the House? Yes, it’s harder. Can we win the Senate? We probably do.

And we could potentially even go up a seat. It’s possible. It’s not super likely. But we could actually have a 54-seat Republican majority without crazy things happening. And that’s just not anything that people are hearing.

What the Next Congress Means — and the Larger Choice

Stephen Gardner: Yeah. Man, your lips to God’s ears. Even if we stayed exactly the same, one thing that I’m excited about is next Congress, starting in January, has less RINOs and more MAGA warriors. Even if the numbers stay the same, the quality of person, the fighter, the America First person is a totally different Congress next year.

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Rod D. Martin: And people are always talking about how there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. And I honestly can’t remember a time ever when that was true. I mean, that wasn’t even true in the 50s when the conservative movement didn’t even exist yet. That just, that’s absurd. I understand the feeling, but the logic just isn’t there. How much more so is that true now?

When so many of these Democratic nominees are members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and we just had the DSA convention, and one of the key leaders of the DSA stands up at the podium and says, verbatim quote, “Our goal is communism.” And the crowd cheered. I mean, he wasn’t booed off the stage. He wasn’t kicked out of the DSA. They loved it.

They believe in this insane radical agenda that we have seen destroy countries all over the world. And not just destroy them. Oh, no, no. Kill millions of their citizens along the way. And they’re just embracing it right and left.

This matters. This is something we actually have to take seriously. And I don’t think enough Republicans are. I hear too many of them kibitzing about gas prices. I’m sorry, guys. I was paying more for gas under Biden, and you weren’t spending all your time complaining then.

So, you know, quit listening to the mainstream media’s talking points. Actually get out there and say, this is what we’re achieving. And this is what they want to achieve. And they’re clear, clear, clear on that point. And I think if Mike Rogers can drive that home, we can win Michigan. I think a lot of these races are very winnable.

But they’re all touch and go. I mean, nothing’s easy. And we need to get over the idea that it is. It’s always going to be hard. You always have a tough opponent. I mean, nobody just waltzes into the Super Bowl and wins. Nobody just waltzes into the World Series and wins.

You’ve got meaningful competition. And we have not done as good a job as we should have of educating the American people on what all these things mean, not just the current story, but the bigger story of freedom versus tyranny. We haven’t done a good enough job of that because we’ve handed over our public schools to the wokesters, who are just Marxists, just plain out Marxists, Maoists even. That is a reality that we’re going to be dealing with for a lot of years.

And so we are going to have to step up our game individually, not just as a party, not just as candidates, but as citizens.

Government Fraud: USAID, Grants, and Accountability

Stephen Gardner: Yeah, I agree. One of my favorite things that President Trump and the Vice President are doing is this war on fraud. The Trump administration is finding record amounts of fraud in Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, USAID, you name it, there’s fraud in it.

I love seeing this cleaned up because I know you pay a lot in taxes. I pay a lot of taxes. People that watch my channel, we all are being taxed really heavily. Why do you think it got so out of control? And why has nobody until Trump and Vance really made an effort to clean that up?

Rod D. Martin: Honestly, we’re looking at so much fraud at this point that you have to, you have to surmise that it’s a feature, not a bug, that this was always the purpose of a lot of these programs. The Democrats get to skim off the top. And you see that everywhere.

You mentioned USAID. USAID was a cesspool. It had a bigger budget than the State Department and the CIA combined. And it turns out only 10 percent, maybe 13 percent of what it was spending money on was actual humanitarian aid. All the rest of it is foreign transgender surgeries, foreign LGBTQ parades, color revolutions in various countries.

And what we really see in, oh, and by the way, 300,000 forced sterilizations of native women in Peru. You know, I thought Democrats were against, you know, harming native women, but apparently not if it involves sterilization and reducing the surplus population.

So, so, you know, just thing after thing, these are heinous, horrible things. But wait, we just saw in Brazil, the biggest single thing, USAID was using your tax dollars to tip the scales in country after country’s elections. That’s what they were doing.

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And from, from stem to stern, from Tierra del Fuego, all the way through Honduras, we now have all of these elections that are supposed to go permanently left, going right, conservative and libertarian governments in all these countries. And now Bolsonaro’s probably going to win this in Brazil, which is really one of the worst offenders and one of the worst to be in bed with China.

So, so all of this changes the instant that the U.S. taxpayer isn’t paying for socialist parties in foreign countries’ political campaigns. It’s just fraud. It is horrible, horrible fraud. And you see it everywhere. It’s not just there.

I mean, you’re talking about welfare fraud.

We can talk about food stamp fraud all day long. That certainly helps attract illegal aliens. They want to come into the country. That helps, that helps pay off their key constituencies they want to by mail or whatever.

But, but it’s not just that. It’s, it’s things like the $2 billion EPA grant. Folks, that’s the Environmental Protection Agency, a $2 billion grant to a one-month-old NGO started by Stacey Abrams in Georgia. How does this help the environment? How does $2 billion of your tax dollars help the environment in the hands of Stacey Abrams? What is her environmental experience?

What is her knowledge base on that? And we all know where that was going. That’s just going to boost her, help her win her next governor’s race, and help make it easier on Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

That’s all it is. It’s about flipping Georgia blue. And, and that’s your tax dollars at work. No, all this fraud has to go. Just cutting the budget isn’t enough. You’re going to have to go after the fraudsters. A bunch of these guys are actually breaking laws. It’s not just bad in theory. It’s actually criminal in a lot of these cases. If I were, if I were anybody in government in Minnesota right now, I’d be very, very concerned. And California and New York are coming right up.

The Book: Trump’s New World Re-Order

Stephen Gardner: Yeah, absolutely. You’ve got a book coming out not too many days from now, called Trump’s New World Re-Order versus new world order. What is the book going to tell us?

Rod D. Martin: Well, the first and foremost thing is that no, Trump isn’t actually just a chaos monster and everybody thinks he is. It’s just random stuff here and there. No, no, this actually all fits together. All of these different policies fit together in a way that is far superior to anything we’ve seen under the beltway elites for most of my lifetime, where everything has been compartmentalized. Nothing touches on anything else. Trade policy is distinct from alliance policy or energy policy or all of that’s nonsense. All of that’s nuts.

So first and foremost, yeah, there’s a plan, and I show you the plan in Trump’s New World Re-Order.

The second thing is it is a multifaceted plan first and foremost at home, making elections matter again because elections really don’t matter if the government never actually changes course. This is why they say there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties.

It’s not that the parties aren’t different. It’s that one party controls the permanent bureaucracy. If you’ve got one president and you’ve got 435 congressmen, only half of whom are our guys, and even that’s a little sketchy, and you’ve got 5,000 political appointees, but you’ve got nearly 3 million permanent federal workers who are unaccountable, unfireable, and absolutely impenetrable.

They have the opinions they have. They were all hired by Democrats. They will all hire Democrats to replace them, and they just keep doing the same things no matter who wins an election. Donald Trump is dismantling that at home. That’s what this litigation strategy is: that gets you to Chevron being overturned, Humphrey’s Executor being overturned, all these landmark cases that I know most people’s eyes glaze over.

But what he’s doing is he’s restoring Article II of the Constitution and eliminating the permanent, unelected power of this illegitimate fourth branch of government that FDR gave us in the ‘30s.

Overseas, it’s kind of the same thing, because we created an order under FDR that was designed to be multilateral. That all sounds really nice, and if you’re a liberal internationalist, that sounds highly moral. But in reality, what it means is the Lilliputians are forever tying down the American Gulliver. We pay the bills. We provide the security. We police the sea lanes. We make global trade possible, and they call the shots.

No, thank you. Not anymore.

So, you know, from trade policy where we’re rebalancing things so that we have the same access to their markets that they get to ours, to energy policy where we’re shifting the center of gravity of global energy from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, to revamping our alliance structure where we expect these guys to be partners, not dependents.

It is ridiculous that Britain has twice as many admirals as warships. It is ridiculous that Germany was showing up at NATO exercises with broomsticks because they didn’t buy enough rifles for their army. It’s absurd. It’s a joke. It’s a Saturday Night Live skit, it’s subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer, and Donald Trump called halt.

So it is a new world re-order. We’re getting rid of the new world order. That’s history. And if we can see this through for the next couple election cycles, this becomes the new normal for the rest of the century. An America run by American voters and a world order that actually is run by the people who pay for it. And that is as it ought to be.

Stephen Gardner: Okay. Sounds amazing. I mean, I try to cover this stuff regularly on the show where, you know, he’s taking back America’s power. He’s getting South America and Central America realigned with us. He’s now captured 60 percent of the world’s oil. He knows that the most powerful thing in the world is oil and the American consumer, and he’s got both of those operating at high capacity.

So I’m excited about your book. I’m going to definitely pick up a copy of that. Rod, thank you very much for coming on and spending time with me today. We will have you on again in the future.

I’ll make sure to put a direct link to your X page as well as your book at the top so that people can find that. Thank you very much. We’ll have you on again in the future.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you. Looking forward to it!

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by Rod D. Martin
October 15, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, there’s more…

Trump Restored American Safety and Sovereignty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump Launched an American Industrial Supercycle

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

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

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

6. He repealed 129 regulations for every new one.

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the greatest story never told!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump Made Elections Matter Again

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

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

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

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

12. He ended nationwide injunction abuse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. He expelled DEI from the federal government.

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

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He Defended Faith and Family

16. He delivered sweeping pro-life reform.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20. He targeted anti-Christian bias and discrimination.

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

He Restored Peace Through Strength and Put America First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Now Act Like It Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because it does.

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

Recent Analysis:

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Full Transcript Below:

by Rod D. Martin and Eric Metaxas
October 14, 2026

Bianca de la Garza, Eric Metaxas and I discuss my new book Trump’s New World Re-Order: Dismantling the Deep State and Ending Postwar Globalist Rule.

In this interview:

• Why Trump’s strategy looks chaotic, but isn’t

• Elections have to matter

• Restoring American manufacturing, investment, and leadership

• Eric Metaxas on why he wanted to publish my book

• Constitutional liberty and a more prosperous world

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It’s a quick 7 minutes you won’t want to miss. Watch, like, and share!

Our Full Discussion:

Donald Trump (archival clip): It’s time to drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.

Bianca de la Garza: The slogan heard around the world: President Trump drained the swamp. That was a Wisconsin campaign speech almost 10 years ago, exactly today, running for his first term in the Oval Office. And now, as we see where the world is going, President Trump, of course, now in his second term, reshaping politics, putting America first, and ensuring the U.S. regained its stance on the world stage.

I’m pleased to bring in right now the next guest, Rod D. Martin, the founder and CEO of Martin Capital and The Rod Martin Report. He’s the former special counsel to PayPal founder and former CEO Peter Thiel. And his new book just dropped. It is called Trump’s New World Re-Order.

Also joining us today, Eric Metaxas, the founder and host of Socrates in the City, The Eric Metaxas Show, and author of his bestselling book, Revolution. And by the way, he wrote the foreword for Rod’s book. So this is why we put you guys together.

But Rod, it’s such a pleasure to see you as we are just weeks away from the midterms. And your book is a fascinating read. You take the point that this is a real decision between a dark age, a golden age, and Trump being sort of a counter-FDR. Explain that.

Rod D. Martin: Well, that’s exactly right. And, you know, people view Trump as some kind of chaos monster. Everything feels disconnected. No, guys: go back and read his books. He wrote a bunch of them. He told you he was going to do that. That is his negotiating style.

But what he has is a masterfully laid-out plan to restore the meaning of elections in America by dismantling the deep state, draining that swamp, getting rid of that unelected, unaccountable, unfireable fourth branch of government that simply is not constitutionally permitted. All of those agencies are part of the executive branch. Article II is clear. They have to be responsible to the elected president, which means the voters.

And second, overseas, creating a new world re-order — not the old “new world order,” but a new world re-order in which America actually leads instead of just paying the bills. That is a sea change. That’s an epochal transformation that lasts, if we don’t blow it, through the end of this century.

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Bianca de la Garza: Well, if we don’t blow it or if, you know, AI doesn’t come and destroy us all, I guess, has been part of the discussion here. I’ll get to that in a minute. I want to just play a little bit of what J.D. Vance just said in a very important state, you know, the Rust Belt, Ohio, because we’re hearing so much of left-wing media talking about the war and affordability. But he talks about the strides that are being made, Eric, to really make sure Americans are back to work and participating in the economy. And it starts a lot with manufacturing. I just want to revisit this soundbite here.

J.D. Vance (clip): If we don’t continue to reindustrialize the country, all the incredible advantages that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, they can disappear and even go in the other direction. $19 trillion in new investment, that’s thousands and thousands of new companies, new factories, new jobs. All of that can go away if we elect a bunch of communists who want to make it easier to ship American jobs overseas.

Bianca de la Garza: There’s a big decision there, full stop. You hit on the history in your book, Revolution, but talk to us about Rod’s book here and why you were writing the foreword, Eric, and this is such an important topic for all Americans to read up on now.

Eric Metaxas: Why I Wanted to Publish Rod’s Book

Eric Metaxas: Well, yes, first of all, thank you, Bianca. I assume everyone listening has already bought at least one copy of my book, Revolution. I’m just assuming that because I want them to buy Rod’s book. Not only did I write the foreword to the book, I’m not joking, I am so excited about what Rod has done in this book — and I explain it in the foreword — that I wanted to publish the book.

I’ve started a publishing imprint, Odysseus Books. I said, “I want to publish this book. I want to push this book.”

Americans need to know what the president is doing. The problem with geniuses like President Trump is that sometimes they’re geniuses, they’re kind of clever, and they don’t want to tell you. They’re playing the game with their enemies where they’re doing this stuff, and it looks confusing. That’s what Rod says, right? But what is he really doing?

Rod explains to us what the president is actually doing, and he does it so brilliantly in this new book, Trump’s New World Re-Order. I said, “Americans need to know what their president is doing.” It is magnificent, and when you see it, you can’t help but rejoice. You can’t help but applaud. You can’t help but want to run to the polls so that we can keep Congress and the Senate, but you kind of need to know behind the scenes.

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In this book, Trump’s New World Re-Order, it pulls that off, and I thought, I mean, it’s one thing to get J.D. Vance up there and to get these people out there explaining it, but if you want it all together so you can see what this president is actually doing, it’s mind-boggling.

Bianca de la Garza: Well, I’ll give Rod the final word because the book really does encapsulate a lot of what people need to know, but also in a way where they can share it because I think they’re also able to converse after they distill some of these, what seems to be complicated. But you really break it down on what are our values, our vision as Americans, and for the world, Rod, and that’s something that is information that people need before they go to vote.

Rod D. Martin: Well, and first of all, thank you for that. I really appreciate that. That was certainly what I was seeking to do. I want people to understand the value of the liberty we have, of the incredible constitutional order we were given, and that we largely put on a shelf for the last 90 years.

Donald Trump is restoring that in concrete ways that are going to be very, very difficult to undo, and the net result of that — plus the reordering of our global relations, whether it’s trade or defense or containing the Chinese communist threat or straightening out the Middle East or getting NATO right — whatever it is you’re looking at, we’re talking about creating a freer, better, more prosperous order. As technology does bound forward, and we’re going to see space development, and all these different things, America needs to lead that.

Bianca de la Garza: We know this is an important conversation. Congratulations on the book as it has dropped now. Eric, always good to have you as well. Gentlemen, we appreciate your thoughtful comments today as we are just weeks away from the critical midterms.

Rod D. Martin: Thank you.

Eric Metaxas: Thank you.

Recent Analysis:

NOTE: Marco Rubio has become one of the greatest Secretaries of State in our history. Here he lays out the case for Western civilization, arguing that the West must reclaim the ancient Greek traits of ambition, curiosity, risk, and excellence that built its civilization.

That includes what he calls the “unapologetic pursuit of national power”: reindustrialization, control of critical supply chains, rebuilt defenses, technological dominance, energy unleashing, and renewed exploration (including space), all grounded in the classical realist understanding that nations have interests and that credible power requires both the means and the willingness to use force.

It is a tour de force of historical understanding, appreciation of our cultural inheritance, and a willingness to defend and expand upon it. It also demonstrates a moral clarity few American leaders have managed. — RDM

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by Marco Rubio
October 7. 2026

There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where hist…

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Our full discussion transcribed after the break:

by Rod D. Martin and Frank Gaffney
October 13, 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!

Frank and I discuss:

• Cutting the head off the snake: Iran’s direction of every Middle East conflict

• Iran’s role in October 7th

• How Trump’s blockade is bankrupting Iran

• Why China isn’t coming to Iran’s rescue

• High gas prices? Blue states keep closing refineries

• PLUS: Just four extra votes per precinct and Republicans win the House

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It’s a full half-hour of in-depth analysis you won’t want to miss. If you prefer to read, the full transcript is below. Watch, read, like, and share!

Our full discussion:

Frank Gaffney: Welcome to Securing America. It’s me, Frank Gaffney, the program that’s a kind of owner’s manual for protecting the country we love against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the glory of God and his kingdom. We’re on the road. We are at the moment outside of Washington, D.C., and very, very delighted to have with us for this full hour, one of our favorite guests.

His name is Rod Martin. He is, among other things, the chairman of the board of the Institute for the American Future, which makes this program possible, for which we are profoundly grateful. We encourage you to support the Institute at USFuture.org for that purpose, among others.

Rod Martin is also a man who served as policy director to then-Governor Mike Huckabee. He was a member of the very, very impactful PayPal mafia back in the day. He is these days, however, the driving force behind The Rod Martin Report, which you can subscribe to at RodMartin.org.

I strongly urge you to do so. We’re going to be talking about several of the prominently featured analyses and articles that Rod has featured there in the course of this program. And we’re very, very pleased to have him back for the purpose. Rod, welcome once again.

October 7 and Iran’s Proxy War

Let me start, Rod, on the occasion of October 7th, on the anniversary of one of the most horrific crimes against humanity, certainly of recent times. That would be Hamas’s attack against innocent Israeli civilians and others out of Gaza into Israel proper three years ago today. You and Eric Metaxas, another man I consider to be a great friend, as well as a very much admired national treasure, had a conversation about this, and I wanted to share it with our guests, with our audience, if we can.

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A brief reprise on the most important point, it seems to me, which is that what’s going on here is, in fact, a product of Iranian Sharia supremacism. And this is a perfect example of how the nostrums about how Sunnis and Shia can’t possibly collaborate with one another or even get along. Talk us through the evidence that Iran was behind this horrific attack and what it says about its malevolence and why this regime, in fact, cannot be allowed to survive.

Rod D. Martin: Well, it certainly turns out that there are more than a few Sunni terrorists who are happy to take Iranian money. And that has been true now for a very long time. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy. The Shia militias in Iraq are Iranian proxies. The Bashar Assad regime was an Iranian proxy. It also worked closely with the Russians, as it had previously worked with the Soviets. But nevertheless, there you are. Hamas, same thing.

And there’s really a very good reason for all of this. First of all, the Palestinians have spent a lot of time in other people’s countries. They were in Jordan in 1970 when they tried to overthrow that government. Once they were kicked out of there, they went to Lebanon and did their best to overthrow that government, and sparked a civil war that, for many purposes, still isn’t over all these decades later. And of course, Hezbollah being the tip of that spear starting in the early 80s.

So there’s just nowhere that these people are welcome in the Arab world because every time they show up in an Arab country, they try to take it over and they blow up school buses and they do terrible, terrible things. So who is left who wants to support them?

I mean, you’ve got all the lip service you get from the normal Arab suspects. Certainly MBS’s father’s generation in Saudi Arabia is very, very committed to the Palestinian cause. The younger Arab leaders, not so much, because they know who these people are. They know what they do. They know that they can’t play nicely with others.

So who does that leave? And of course we know the answer, Tehran. And the mullahs have spent decades backing these guys, arming them, training them, funding them, directing them with a very clear aim. They have extended, until the last year or so, they have extended an Iranian empire across the Middle East, de facto though it might be. And that, of course, includes our Houthi friends in Yemen as well. So there’s just no end to this unless you end it.

And certainly October 7th was fundamentally about that. It was the Iranian aim to use Hamas as a suicide squad to go and provoke a conflict that would result in a delay or possibly, you know, just never happening, some kind of peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which at the time looked imminent. Well, again, I think they’re going to fail in the long-term goal, but they succeeded for years now, and that was the aim.

And everyone involved knew Hamas was going to die in the process. On the other hand, the Hamas leaders didn’t care that much because they were in fancy condos in Qatar. So, you know, “everybody wins,” except the people on the ground, of course.

And they were successful in demonizing Israel, despite Israel being the victim. So I’ll just wrap that thought up: the most salient point about October 7th is that it wasn’t actually equivalent to an Israeli 9/11. It was equivalent to an Israeli Nagasaki. When you look at the number of people who were murdered on that day and you adjust it proportionately to the Israeli population, to compare to the U.S. population, we would have had to have lost 50,000 people on 9/11, not 3,000.

That’s staggering. That’s a nuclear strike. That’s what Hamas did. That’s what they pulled off. And that directly results in the Israeli response.

The Israelis had withdrawn from Gaza 20 years earlier. They had done everything they could to just let those people do their thing by themselves. And Hamas was having none of it, raining down rockets into Israeli neighborhoods for years, sometimes as many as 5,000 in a single year, going after Israeli homes and schools and everything else. And the Israelis mostly didn’t respond.

But October 7th provoked the response the Iranians wanted. And that is, of course, why we had a war.

Frank Gaffney: And why that war is continuing, I guess, is because that regime continues to engage in both its horrific predations against its own people, as well as, of course, trying to do whatever it can to attack others. Our own forces, of course, and bases elsewhere in the region included. And let me just ask you, as you are contemplating the bottom line of all of this, Rod, is there really any possible outcome other than this regime being, well, put out of business?

Rod D. Martin: Well, there are other possible outcomes, but I don’t think there’s another likely outcome. I think this president has been very clear about his intent, even if he has kept it out of official war aims and so forth. But, you know, we talked about this all the way back in January.

Donald Trump was horrified by the Iranian regime murdering 42,000 of its own citizens, unarmed protesters in the streets. And immediately after that, you start having the gathering of the military forces necessary to attack Iran. And that is ongoing. I don’t think he’s going to stop.

Commercial break

Frank Gaffney: We are having a conversation with one of our most valuable contributors to this program, a man whose free-range mind is something that we’re privileged to tap as we try to do each week. His name is Rod Martin. He is the founder of a series of enterprises, I guess it’s fair to say, among the most important of them at the moment being, of course, the RodMartin.org web resource with The Rod Martin Report.

He is also bringing to us momentarily, I’m pleased to say, I think available for pre-order right now from Skyhorse Press, a wonderful new book. I guess it’s the Eric Metaxas imprint at Skyhorse called Trump’s New World Re-Order. It’s very, very important that you find out what is the distilled essence of Rod’s thinking on this very important subject, and we’ll tap the book, among other things, as well as his website, rodmartin.org, in the course of this conversation.

So, Rod, I apologize, I had to cut you off there. You were, I think, making the conclusory point about what the regime in Iran has done, not only to Jews and others in Israel through its cutout Hamas, but what it has done itself to its own people, and what Donald Trump has done in response to its horrific, well, murders of 40-some thousand of them, for example.

Rod D. Martin: It’s just extraordinary. And we’re talking about a regime, when we’re talking about the Iranian mullahs, we are talking about a regime that actually executes young girls for getting raped. This is an evil, evil, malignant force in the world, and again, it’s the center of every armed conflict in the Middle East, bar none. Pick any, and it’s the Iranians behind it.

So, the good news is, the war has actually been very successful, whether you’re talking about the Israeli portion of it or the American portion of it. On the Israeli side, they’ve really, really taken a bite out of Hamas. It’s going to be very, very difficult for Hamas to reconstitute in any meaningful way, and all the more so because without Iranian money and arms, where are they going to get money and arms? You know, even terrorists have to make payroll, so they have a problem.

Hezbollah has the same problem, but Hezbollah also has a Syrian regime now in its hinterland that hates it because Hezbollah is a threat to the Syrians, and the Syrians are a mess, but at least they’re no longer Iran’s friends.

That’s a good thing, and we actually now have a Lebanese government that has sat down across a table from the Israelis with Marco Rubio and signed a deal that actually, for the first time in history — Lebanon’s been at war of its own choosing with Israel since 1948 — they sat down and signed an agreement in which they take responsibility for disarming Hezbollah, and they also recognize the territorial integrity of Israel, which is a first ever. So that’s on its way to some kind of Camp David Accord or Abraham Accords or whatever, and there’s possibility of that with Syria as well.

The Iranian-sponsored militias in Iraq being decimated by the new government there, which is making arrests right and left of Shia militia leaders. The government in Yemen just took back a key bit of territory along the coast from the Houthis, so everywhere we’re rolling these guys up, and honestly, in a way, we should probably thank Iran because had they not started these awful wars, we wouldn’t now be in a position to finish them, which brings us to Iran.

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Trump’s Strategy and the Midterm Calendar

I don’t think Donald Trump’s going to stop until this regime is gone. He knows that all of his goals in the Middle East key off of that, and I think that’s what you’re seeing really with this Mecca Pact. You know, the most interesting thing about the Mecca Pact is that Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, if you draw a line around them, oh, wait, at the center is Iran. I think that’s the target they’ve organized for. And, you know, the Iranians have managed to unite everybody against them.

So Trump has been very, very careful, I think, to destroy targets that are needed by the IRGC to conduct a war. He has been very careful not to attack critical infrastructure and economic assets that a free Iran will need after a war. And I think that’s where we’re going.

I’ve been telling you all year, I don’t think Donald Trump is calculating the midterms into any of this. He’s going to do what he wants to do. I think we’re now — in October, less than a month before the midterms — clearly able to say conclusively, I was right on that point. He sees this as a legacy thing. I don’t think he’s going to stop until it’s done. I think that’s where we’re headed, and I think it’ll be a boon to the entire world.

Frank Gaffney: Well, I think it’s absolutely essential, and I hope you’re right, Rod. But, you know, he has, over these months, talked periodically about fashioning a deal. It does seem as though he’s decided not to do that at this point, and more of this will be forthcoming after the election.

Rod D. Martin: I think the deal was always, you guys leave, and we’ll get you a really nice villa on the Riviera. And they just haven’t been willing to do that. So that’s okay. We can send them there in a box.

Frank Gaffney: Yeah, let’s dispatch them permanently, I think, is the point.

Iran’s Money, Oil, and the Strait of Hormuz

Rod, speaking of Iran, Scott Bessent had, of course, two weeks or so ago said that he thought the outfit would be bankrupt, the Iranian regime, that is, in about two weeks. That, you know, they were simply out of oil to sell, and without it, there was just not much in the way of cash flow and, therefore, the ability to pay. Well, not just their foreign terrorists, but their own terrorists there in the IRGC and Basij and so on.

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But at the same time, we’re being told that the output of oil and gas through the Persian Gulf, not the pipelines outside of it and so on, but actually through the Gulf itself, are now at pre-war levels. And that, in fact, that’s without any Iranian oil at all in the mix, which is suggestive that there’s quite a turnaround here.

Is that, in fact, the case as you see it, sir? Is that one-off, you know, good luck in, you know, getting some stuff through at one particular point in time? Or is there really a turnaround that’s taking place here? And will we see the impact on oil prices anytime soon, do you think?

Rod D. Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yes, it’s real. And, yes, there’s very little that the Iranians can do about it. We sank what navy they had. It turns out there really weren’t a meaningful number of mines in the strait. And Trump is committed to getting these oil prices down, not at the cost of letting the Iranians have their way, but you don’t need to.

Now, what isn’t coming through is container traffic. What isn’t coming through is LNG from Qatar. Honestly, that helps. I mean, what that means is that everyone in the region is inconvenienced by the Iranians and has reason to be mad at them. And we’re actually gathering LNG contracts that would normally go to Qatar for Texas and Louisiana. So it’s a little hard to see this as anything but an absolute win.

And in the meantime, Bessent is right, as he is almost always right. The Iranians don’t have any way to make money. You and I have talked about that. There’s a railway between Iran and China that can carry like six percent of the oil they were shipping before. That’s not enough to make a dent.

And it’s worse than that because the Iranian president went on Fox News and gave an interview to them a couple weeks ago in which he said, “The Chinese have now frozen our money. We can’t get our money out of China.” Okay, well, game over, you know, and it’s just a matter of time because IRGC thugs have to be paid too.

Frank Gaffney: Right.

We are visiting with Rod Martin. We’re going to be talking a bit now about the reordering of the world that Donald Trump is engaged in. He is making it clear that this is not just taking place in the Middle East, but we’re going to get into some of the other places, and in particular what it means for us, both in a geostrategic sense, but also in terms of pocketbook issues, which, of course, are top of mind for a lot of people in this election season.

So, Rod, on the point that Bessent was making, is it your view that we are approaching a point where, as with the Soviet Union, when my old boss Ronald Reagan essentially cut off their cash flow, we’re likely to see the regime come apart? Or are these people, you know, dead-enders, and they will go down to the last man and killing their own countrymen and as many of us as they can get their hands on in the process?

Rod D. Martin: I think that at some point, people have to get paid, and I think that was ultimately the problem in the Soviet Union. That was ultimately the problem with Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox. At some point, you can have all the will and grit and determination and intransigence you want, but if you can’t eat, you can’t eat. And that was really the Soviets’ problem. I don’t think anybody thinks that the communists had any lack of desire to fight to the last breath. They just ran out of ability.

And so that’s what we’re attempting here. We’ll see if it works. I mean, we’re not doing it with a land invasion. We’re not doing it the way you would normally think of, and thank God for that, because that would be a disaster. But we have cut them off.

You know, in the American Civil War, the North used a blockade strategy as well, and it was not one hundred percent effective, but it actually did reduce Southern exports by ninety-five percent, which resulted in hyperinflation, resulted in just the dismantling of the Southern economy.

And yeah, with the technology of the time, you had to also match that with an invasion in several places. No question about that. But that isn’t necessarily so today, when the Chinese can just cut off their money. That’s really a quite remarkable thing.

And you’ll recall that pre-war, ninety percent of Iran’s oil was going straight to China. The Chinese have adjusted to the loss. They are buying from other sources.

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That puts a huge hurt on their economy because they were using that steeply discounted Iranian oil, as with Venezuela, as with Russia, to be able to prop up and subsidize their export economy. That’s gone now.

But it is something they have just accepted. They don’t have a lot of choice. There’s nothing they can do that’s meaningful for Iran. And they know that. And I think we saw that in the amount of non-decisive talk at the most recent summit with Xi in Washington, followed up by a cutting off of Iran’s money, which actually is pretty decisive.

How Much Help Can China and Russia Provide?

Frank Gaffney: Is it your understanding, Rod, that the components for drones and ballistic missiles and the like that the Chinese were supplying, I think, some of it being flown in and some of it coming across that Pakistani train corridor, has come to a halt as well as access to money in China?

Rod D. Martin: Well, probably not entirely, but the Chinese are pretty mercenary. I mean, this is one of the reasons they told the Iranians, we’re not going to sell you advanced fighter jets. The Iranians have been begging them to do that for years. And the response from Beijing is, yeah, but you guys don’t pay. We don’t trust you to pay, and you are asking for credit that we know you’re not good for.

So, you know, when you look at that, and honestly, if you look at any of the Belt and Road countries, it’s the same thing over and over. The Chinese set up debt traps. They don’t actually create alliances. And over time, people catch on. So I think it’s time we catch on.

I’m not saying that the Chinese might not send them stuff. The Chinese are not our friends. However, there’s only so much they can do. And the same thing’s true with Russia.

Russia is in its own quagmire, and they were trying to send some stuff by the Caspian route to Iran. And Zelensky blew it up on the water. That was like the coolest thing Zelensky’s done in the entire war. So they’re really in a bind. And the road links are tenuous at best because we can take them out at will, and they’re not going to get help from the neighbors that they were hoping for. So, yeah, I think we’re close. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but we’re close to the end.

Gasoline Prices, Refining Capacity, and the Midterms

Frank Gaffney: It’s, as always, Rod, heartening to hear your assessment. And I don’t think anything you’ve said is disputable. Whether it’s as complete a picture as one might want is another question. But I think it’s important to be giving us some hope in all of this. And just to tie this off, Rod, obviously the president and pollsters and politicians of other stripes are hearing a lot about the price of the gas pump and the price in the grocery stores and so on. Is there relief, do you think, in prospect, in time to make a difference in this election, sir?

Rod D. Martin: Ah, maybe. Look, this is a turnout election, and I can’t stress that enough. If we turn out about a thousand more voters in about 20 U.S. House districts that are tightly contested, we win. I mean, it’s really that simple. That works out, by the way, to four more voters per precinct in the targeted areas. Four. I mean, I can put four in my car and drive them to the polls. This isn’t hard.

So Republicans need to get their act together. I mean, you’re unhappy about gas prices, so you want to let the guys get in who told you they’re going to ban gasoline. They’re going to ban gasoline cars. They’re going to force you to buy an EV, which I’m sure will not be a Tesla because they’re mad at Elon, so it’ll probably be a Chinese car. And this is somehow better. I mean, it’s just stupid. So our team actually has to stop being stupid and actually clue in and do what they need to do to win.

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Now, the president isn’t helping us with the Iran thing. There’s no question about that, but there are two other very short points about that. The first one is this is an essential task, and the time chose him, not he chose the time.

Second, the real bottleneck on gas is on oil. Now, the refineries have to buy on futures contracts, and it is what it is, but the truth is West Texas Intermediate today is at $89, which is, you know, it’s only $20 more than it was before the war, you know, versus Brent, which is over $100.

We’re doing fine on crude, where we’re lacking is refineries, and since the war began, the Democrats in California shuttered two more major refineries. If the national average is high, that’s a big part of why. And if you want to take that national, if you want the Democrats in power to be able to shut down a bunch of refineries in Texas and Louisiana, too, and put gas over $10, well, be my guest. Have at it. But that’s stupid, and we shouldn’t do it. And don’t be complaining about the price of oil if you’re going to do that, obviously, right? This is something that can be controlled.

Frank Gaffney: Yeah, this is ours to lose.

Rod D. Martin: It absolutely is.

Frank Gaffney: So, Rod, let me just put it this way. One other piece of all of this, it seems to me, in terms of getting people to the polls, as we’ve talked about on this program on any number of occasions, is to be telling them that you recognize something that they’re worried about is actually a threat. And that would be what I call Sharia supremacism. And that you’re going to do something about it, not just admire the problem or not just throw a sop to those who are concerned and disregard the need for action. What we have been seeing, I think, in some parts of the country, at least, is people really wanting action taken here. And Texas is one of those places. Can you comment briefly on the importance of clarity, particularly about the red piece of this so-called red-green axis, as well as the Sharia supremacist green part?

Rod D. Martin: Well, we’re at a point where the Democratic Socialists of America are just telling you that they’re communists. You know, we had here a little over a month ago the big DSA convention. One of the senior leaders gets up at the podium and says, “Our goal is communism,” quote, unquote. And the crowd cheers. This is who they are.

Talarico isn’t fooling anybody. Abdul El-Sayed isn’t fooling anybody.

And I think, again, if we do our part and just pile friends into our cars and drive them to the polls, we’ve got this. The numbers, the turnout numbers are so low in a midterm election that direct action by regular people really does determine the outcome. So we need to be the ones who do it. But, yeah, the communists.

Frank Gaffney: To be clear, you’re not talking about direct action as in the violent sense of the word. You’re talking about—

Rod D. Martin: No, no, we’re not Democrats. We don’t kill people.

Frank Gaffney: I just want to be clear about that, folks, unless there’s any disagreement.

Rod, thank you. Congratulations on the forthcoming arrival of Trump’s New World Re-Order. And thank you for visiting with us about so many different aspects of what that reorder looks like. We look forward to a real deep dive on the book when it is available. In the meantime, stay well, my friend. Come back to us soon. I hope the rest of you do the same next time. And until then, you will go forth and multiply.

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