Administrivia.
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Prices pulled Friday. Gold $4,618.20 Silver $69.72 Bitcoin $79,320
Seems like such an obvious solution.
We need a Conservative majority.
Until then, we will…
Stuff…
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Revolution of ideas
Lawrence Reed’s new book, “Born of Ideas: How Principles, Faith, and Courage Forged America,” is out September 1, and every American thinker will appreciate it.
Greg Maresca | August 21, 2026
At a time when universities are shuttering their presses, Grove City College has launched Faith & Freedom Press through publisher Whitaker House. Their inaugural book, “Born of Ideas,” written by distinguished author, academic and historian Lawrence W. Reed, frames how our nation’s founding was “born of ideas” through the lens of faith, personal responsibility and divine purpose.
Rather than reiterating the more conventional Revolutionary yarns, Reed commences his dissertation not in 1776 but with the Mayflower Compact in 1620. Reed is a learned student of the genre and devotes nearly a quarter of his tome explaining why the Mayflower Compact is not merely a political agreement but was rooted in the Pilgrims’ religious conviction that they were acting under God’s providence.
Reed, the author of more than a dozen books that blend liberty, economic history and political philosophy, underscores how America emerged first not from battlefields or politics, but from covenantalism that shaped much of freedom’s prevailing rise.
Divine Providence is a partner to the covenant. It is with the whole of the people not just between leaders covering the whole of life and the consent of the governed mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. Historically, it dates back to the book of Exodus that many scholars argue influenced the development of self-government and the later American doctrine of the consent of the governed.
Reed acknowledges America’s founding was first “a revolution of ideas” while still emphasizing the extraordinary nature of the American Revolution. As he writes in the Introduction, “Ours was first a revolution of ideas that produced a revolution in governance accomplished by heroes and ordinary Americans.”
The brevity of the 32 chapters does not diminish its clarity. Rather, it sharpens Reed’s argument and keeps the narrative moving into a fast read of 143 pages that can be accomplished in one sitting that delivers a fresh look at what makes the American experiment exceptional.
It is this mosaic approach that is the book’s defining strength. The chapters are historical vignettes that are crisp, thematic and tightly focused that absorb the founding era and its moral, philosophical and economic foundations. These engaging essays Reed says, “tells a particular story about a key figure or an aspect of the Revolution.”
Reed introduces readers to both the known and unsung heroes whose convictions shaped a nation. Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine appear, but Reed also devotes space to lesser-known contributors: Pelatiah Webster, “America’s First Economist”; Mercy Otis Warren, “The Conscience of a Great Cause” and Joseph Warren the fallen hero of Bunker Hill that made the American experience unique and yet remain essential today.
Whether discussing paper money, Native American alliances, Lafayette’s contributions, or the Roman influence on American republicanism, Reed returns repeatedly to the same core ideas: liberty, moral courage, personal responsibility and the belief that ideas, not accidents, forged the nation.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/revolution-of-ideas
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Hilariously winning, without DumoCrat whining AND Pravda News incessant playing the illegals Victim Card.
Trump’s huge deportation success story
One of the Trump administration’s unheralded recent accomplishments is the speed, efficiency, and volume of its current deportation efforts.
Andrea Widburg | August 21, 2026
One of Trump’s biggest campaign promises was that he would close our borders to illegal immigration and remove those illegal aliens already here. He has indeed almost completely closed America’s southern border, but the Democrats then managed to turn deportation into a cause célèbre that seemed to derail that effort. It didn’t occur to them that Trump would find another way to accomplish the goal, or that Democrat politicians in blue states would help him.
Early this year, the headwinds seemed to be blowing in the Democrats’ direction. When Rebecca Good was killed while aiming a car at an ICE agent and a (legally) armed Alex Pretti was killed while violently resisting ICE agents, they seemed like the perfect poster children for the Democrats’ anti-ICE and anti-deportation push. Democrats thought it helped that there were other incidents in which illegal aliens confronting ICE also managed to get killed.
But somehow, despite the Democrat base’s hysteria, the American public didn’t rally to the cause. Those illegal immigrants who were killed turned out to have been engaged in violent actions against ICE agents or had heinous personal records. There were no George Floyd-style marches and riots. Without COVID lockdowns to make people desperate for any reason to get out of the house, and with most Americans happy to see the last of violent illegal aliens in their communities, this was not going to be a winning cause.
Trump then wisely removed the grandstanding Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, replacing her with the ostensibly low-key but incredibly effective Tom Homan. With that, the air really went out of the Democrat anti-ICE balloon.
Sure, the Democrats are still agitating over ICE. It’s their cause, and the Democratic Socialists’ cause. Indeed, the DNC, reflecting the DSA’s power within the party, just approved competing resolutions about ICE. One demands that ICE reform, while the other wants to abolish it entirely.
However, while Democrats at the national level are fighting over the finer details of leaving tens of millions of illegal aliens in America, Benny Johnson reports that ICE is going about its work with Homan-esque low-key efficiency:
The tweet continues:
…million deportations across the calendar year.
+69,000 illegals are in DHS jails waiting to be deported at this moment.
And you haven’t heard a blip about it in the corporate press. Why? My DHS source says “stealth tactics.”
“We’re everywhere in every major city. We tell no one. Plain clothes. Beat up old cars. Quick work. Tactical strikes. No one sees anything. No drama. No tears. No media circus. You’re just going back home where you belong.”
And here’s where it gets insane…
DHS tells me blue states are quietly and very secretly working with the Trump administration to assist in the mass deportation of criminals. The criminal alien issue has become so “politically toxic” and “costly” that Democrat Governors have given the green light to Sheriffs and Police Chiefs in major blue cities to drop their illegals off with undercover ICE for removal.
It’s happening. You just don’t see it.
We can track if these numbers hold, but as for now this is a historic white pill and exactly what MAGA voted for.
This is great news. We are a country of people whose forebears immigrated here legally and promised when they arrived never to become a charge on the American people (a promise my hard-working parents kept).
It is absolutely unsustainable for a nation to be flooded with people whose first act is to violate the law, who immediately suck on the government teat (whether federal, state, or local), who are often criminally inclined, and who do not share our values and cannot or will not assimilate. If you want to see how that story ends, just look at Europe and the UK, which may be majority Muslim in the next 10 or 15 years.
There’s one more thing I like about the tweet, and that’s the bit about the blue state politicians assisting ICE. They’re cowards for refusing to do this openly, and they’re hypocrites for aiding deportations but not speaking out against their party’s stance on illegal aliens in America. And of course, we know that, once the illegal aliens are gone, leading to an inevitable decrease in crime rates and a drop in housing costs, they’ll claim that it was their leftist policies that made the difference.
For that reason, I sincerely hope that, once ICE drains a blue city or state of its illegal aliens, Tom Homan turns around and thanks those Democrat politicians for all their help with getting the job done.
Image created using AI.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/trump-s-huge-deportation-success-story
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In case someone missed this one.
Trump quietly reopens Hormuz
We can now move a lot of oil without them being able to do much about it.
Frank Friday | August 21, 2026
As I wrote at the time, Pres. Trump made a good deal in June, got the oil flowing, and left the Iranians with no leverage and few benefits. So the IRGC reneged on it in a few weeks and started shooting.
Now we learn the U.S. Navy has set up a stealth convoy system for Hormuz that is taking 9-15 million barrels a day out of the Gulf, according to Energy Sec. Chris Wright. When you combine that with the 7-8 million barrels from the Hormuz bypass pipes, we are getting back to the pre-war normal of 20 million barrels from the Gulf.
Wright was bitterly mocked by the MSM when he announced this last week, but further mainstream reporting is now conceding this is basically true. While all the national and international media obsessed about the hopeless position the United States had reached, the stalemate was carefully being reversed.
It seems our military specifically targeted Iran’s anti-ship capacity, including coastal radars and look-out boats, over the last two months. It is very much harder to hit fast-moving tankers with a missile than a fixed land target. Especially if it is being protected by Navy jammers and interceptors.
The ball is in the Iranian court. We can now move a lot of oil without them being able to do much about it. Complicating things further, while the IRGC is firmly in control of the country, apparently each commander has near autonomy for his own forces. That leaves decision-making slow, and the guys in charge of the dwindling missile forces may not be in agreement with Tehran on what to do next.
While they figure it out, we might see a big drop in oil prices. This may lead to a situation like 1988, when the Iranians threw in the towel after President Reagan destroyed their navy and ended Iran’s first attempt to block the Gulf.
On the other hand, if the IRGC wants to keep playing a losing hand, they can strike the oil fields and desalination plants of their neighbors and try to take everyone down with them.
So far, they talk like that, but I wonder if that is more for show. All-out war would, in the end, leave Pres.. Trump and the Arab states no choice but some kind of Allied ground invasion to end the regime; much like Pres. Trump did in 2017 with ISIS in Iraq and Syria. I suspect the Iranian regime knows whose side most ordinary Iranians will be on if it comes to that.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/trump-quietly-reopens-hormuz
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Just for the hell of it.
Newsom Math:
We will spend 5 billion but get 1 billion back.
That’s 1 billion in savings.
They’re coming for your cars in California
New tire regulations will add hundreds of dollars to tire costs and drive 70 percent of tire manufacturers out of the market.
So what happens under solid blue rule when the budget gets blown out, the taxes hit the limit, the billionaires flee, and the government appetite for spending just gets bigger?
In California, they start to eye the things that make California California: Cars, freedom, houses, prosperity. It’s not just necessity, of course. They also long to make it Not California.
We’re seeing these kinds of new developments, and none of them are good.
According to the Santa Monica Observer:
Sacramento just dropped another regulatory bomb on everyday Californians.
The California Energy Commission unanimously approved the nation’s first replacement tire efficiency standards on Monday, setting strict limits on rolling resistance for tires sold in the state. Phase 1 kicks in for tires manufactured starting in 2029. The tougher Phase 2 hits in 2033.
Tire industry representatives say the 2033 standards would eliminate roughly 70% of the replacement tires currently on the market from being sold in California. Goodyear and America’s Tire have warned that applying the Phase 2 limits to today’s inventory would knock out the majority of available options.
The rules require lower rolling resistance (less energy lost as heat when the tire rolls) and a minimum wet-grip standard so replacement tires match the efficiency of the ones that come on new cars. Specialty tires – deep-tread off-road, certain winter/all-weather, competition, and some others – get carve-outs.
The Energy Commission insists the changes will save drivers nearly $1 billion a year in fuel and electricity costs statewide and cut 2 million metric tons of CO2 annually. It pegs the extra cost to consumers at just $1.50 per tire in Phase 1 and $6.50 in Phase 2, with fuel savings quickly offsetting that.
State officials claim it will add just $6.50 to the cost of a tire, a veritable nothingburger, not explaining why they needed to use an obscure 2003 law to justify it, or why they need to do it in phases. After all, why not do it all at once and reap the tax benefits if it’s just the little piddly thing they claim it is? We all know this story.
Here’s the lie sheet from the California Energy Commission, no guaranteed refunds offered when the opposite of what they promise actually happens, and it will. Many have noted that tire manufacturers are not at all onboard with this bad idea, and the supposed support from the big ones is the equivalent of CostCo getting its shops open during the lockdowns while everyone else had theirs closed, they stand to benefit from all the small fry shutting down. Meanwhile, if you like to stick your head into a live volcano, read the comments section:
More…
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/they-re-coming-for-your-cars-in-california
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Back to boilerplate…
Looking forward to Alberta leaving Canuckistan.
Hopefully joining America.
Grateful our ancestors broke the British chains, again, and again…
Thankfully, Trump is finishing off the Brits, Canucks… Along with NATO. Ideally UN.
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Stay The Course. Trust Trump. Remember…
Never, Ever, forget what they did to us.
Celebrate America, Everyday!!!
Relax, It’s Saturday.
Night crew, your nickel.
KK