For years, certain free-market conservatives have dismissed Social Security as a bankrupt, compulsory government Ponzi scheme.

They pointed to demographics, political raiding of the trust funds, and a worker-to-beneficiary ratio that has collapsed from over 40-to-1 in the early decades to under 3-to-1 today. The actuarial math looked grim enough that those critics appeared headed for vindication.

Trustees reports have long projected the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund’s exhaustion in the early 2030s. After that point, incoming payroll taxes would cover only about 78 percent of scheduled benefits. That trajectory has shifted under President Trump.

Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano, a trustee of the system, has stated plainly that the program “will be around for another 90 years.”

“This is a long journey. It’s 90 years old, and it’ll be around for another 90 years,” he said. “The president has promised to protect and preserve, and that’s what we’re doing.”

The change rests on concrete actions. . .

Since Jimmy Carter, the Democrat Party’s foreign and domestic brief has converged on one operating premise: American decline is inevitable, and the Party’s claim to power is that it will manage that decline more gracefully than its rivals.

Each Democrat administration from Carter through Biden has added policies that, taken together, shrank American hard power, ceded industrial ground to China, loosened control of the border, and turned federal institutions inward against domestic opponents while exacerbating political and cultural divisions among Americans.

The Trump administration’s second-term program, a hemispheric “Fortress America” strategy, is best understood as a deliberate reversal of that brief.

Let us examine the premise.

There is a strange spectacle unfolding in American politics. The Democratic establishment calculatingly spends its dwindling energies bowing to its growing and increasingly radical left wing that has openly declared its intention to replace it.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the streamers, the campus activists, and the insurgent candidates who style themselves as the party’s conscience have never hidden their goal. They do not want a seat at the table. They want the whole tent, and they have said so.

Yet the establishment responds not with resistance but with flattery, cheerfully murmurating about how big that tent is. That now proverbial tent has become a cage, and the Democrats are in it.

To understand why, we have to understand the historically peculiar power of the radical left. In raw numbers, it remains a minority within the party, but numbers have never been its weapon.

Its weapon is intensity.

She’s the Scrappy-Doo of corporate mascots — a cloying, cringeworthy new character that repulses the target audience.

It’s simply a bad concept: Instead of coming across as cute or clever, it feels cynical and self-serving. The audience hates it!

But we’ll get back to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in just a sec.

Insurance companies run the damnedest ad campaigns, and it costs ‘em a pretty penny: Every year, Progressive, Allstate, GEICO, and State Farm spend over a billion EACH on advertising. (Aflac, surprisingly, spends “only” about $100 million.)

So there are lots of opportunities to throw feces at a wall and see what sticks.

But 99% of the time, Big Insurance sticks to marketing campaigns built around a specific protagonist. And not just any protagonist either — only the crème de la crème will make the final cut:

1. Geckos
2. Emus
3. Ducks
4. Jake/Flo/Mayhem Guy
5. Peyton Manning

Then, on July 20, 2026, Liberty Mutual unleashed Liberty Biberty on an unsuspecting world.

“There are certain social principles in human nature, from which we may draw the most solid conclusions with respect to the conduct of individuals and of communities.” —Alexander Hamilton (1788)

Over the last three years, there have been downward trends in corporate support for leftist woke agendas and efforts to identify with progressives and social justice activists.

Hit hardest are corporate campaigns promoting gender confusion and diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas. Those declines started in the Joe Biden years and have accelerated under Donald Trump.

Community and corporate support for so-called “Pride Month” celebrations has been trending downward for several years, driven in part by the Demos’ ever more deviant transnormalcy agenda — especially promoting the Demo/LGBT advocacy for so-called “gender-affirming” care for children, which is code for “gender mutilation” of children.

As our managing editor Nate Jackson concluded during last year’s Pride Month: “Maybe it’s a reaction to the overreach of leftist culture warriors foisting ‘pride’ on everyone through increasingly lewd public displays, often billed as ostensibly ‘family friendly.’ Maybe it’s simply that more people are figuring out that Pride Month is gross.”

And the question now, especially given the high-profile increase in mass violence perpetrated by those suffering from gender-disorientation pathology, is this: Will the gender cult implode?

Diversity is Britain's strength, we're told. But apparently the immigrants in Birmingham aren't so certain about that.

They are complaining that British natives are stealing their jobs, which explains why they are on welfare.

Since they can't find work by taking the jobs from white Brits, they are forced to rely on those native Brits' taxes to fund the welfare that keeps them living in comfort.

That seems to be the upshot of Michael Deacon's interviews in the migrant neighborhoods of Birmingham, where welfare use is through the roof. Wondering why, he decided to find out by asking the people who need it.

Over the past couple of decades, more than a few British people have accused immigrants of stealing their jobs, by under-cutting them on pay. At last, though, it seems that things may be starting to change. Because these days, apparently, it’s the other way round.