By Taylor Lewis

The Brits have a term for the sultry ennui that undresses, betwixt June and August, the serious business of news broadcasting: “silly season.” America’s industriousness may outpace the old continent, but its domestic politics is on permanent vacay. Our legislative fooleries go all four seasons, never taking a sabbatical, unless you count the five-minute-until-midnight drills when lawmakers straighten their grins to pass an Encyclopedia-sized spending bill to keep the government open. The civic carnival, as Harry Belafonte sang, don’t stop.

By high-July, the sottises hit their summit. Fourth of July kabooms have sizzled out. All that’s left to look forward to is a long, cicada-humming stretch until Labor Day. This year feels more acedious than normal. The sun boils the Potomac River, sending drafts of mirey pestilence awaft through Washington. Canadian wildfire smokeoff chokes the country in an ochre haze. The Reflecting Pool is strangely bare; supposedly civil engineers drained it, though the lingering heat dome may have evaporated its fathoms. A fanning excrementitious virus has made an already morassful metro uninhabitable.

What’s a dutiful columnist to do to fill his inches? The only option when the thermostat tops triple digits: squint my baby browns against the lasering glare, and find what, if anything, piques concern in the most unconcerned time of the year.

War roils the Middle East; pump prices notch higher; elections deciding control of Congress are four months away. The President should exhibit some smidge of concern for his party’s faltering approvals, right? WRONGGGG. With only window wipers and office vacuumers still left in the arid town, the commander-in-chief commandeered the prime-time lineup to reveal electoral chicanery…from 2020. When he was president and foreign shenanigans were under his executive purview. Engineered by those shifty Chicoms. That failed to sway the outcome either way.

Feely feminists may be right: men really will do anything but go to therapy for long-held grievances.

Alphabetical legacy networks like NBC and ABC gauged American-interest capacity correctly and opted to run “Law & Order: SVU” and “Seinfeld” reruns instead. Trump groused mightily about “fake news” and coverups, but his furious air was cooler than the lingering equatorial miasma emanating from “the Swamp.”

The reshuffling Maine Democratic primary proved almost noteworthy, after the party of antifa and #metoo drummed its vergewaltigungfuhrer out of the race. Nearly a dozen candidates vied for nomination in a hastily scheduled “debate” that was more P.T.A. grandstand than philosophical discussion. The borax affair was as thrilling as a schoolmarm conference could be, with the exception of a lone undercard hopeful, a man in a mumu calling himself “Ashley,” whose large, unblinking eyes bore the indelible impression of “America’s Most Wanted.” When asked his qualifications for seeking a Senate term, “Ashley,” née James, cited being a “songwriter” and writing “my own books.” He also claims to regularly go through the female cycle via his sternside. Being an actual author, and unreliant on L.L.M.s or a contract-ghostwriter, does, in fact, make Webb the most qualified statesman in a bunch of cookie-cutter donothings. Alas, no Mainers were willing to caucus for a real creative soul. Still, Webb’s outré earnestness provided a brief viral moment to an otherwise platitudinous congress.

The doldrummous drag was nearly interrupted when Fox News, casting for something shiny to boost ratings, hosted Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter. At last, a heavyweight bout! The conservatiest station in America brings its full broadcasting weight to bear on a man-bunned tankie with a name straight out of one of Timothy Dalton’s Bond cinescapades. Socialist candidates have been knocking off Democratic incumbents in the Northeast Corridor as of late. Perhaps this freshfaced bolshie could shed light on why laptop classwarriors are flocking like gulls to hardleft upstarts. Maybe MAGA Boomers could even learn something about the dispossessive economy they’ve bequeathed.

What does Gordillo do when he has the most-watched news camera pinned to his youthful mien? He takes a very unsocialistic tact: bluntly calling for the abolition of this or that “oppression,” like he was choosing sides for Arby’s 5 for $5 meal. The U.S. Senate? An “undemocratic institution” that empowers Wyoming hicks over urbanites. Humble bodegeans struggling to compete against government-backed grocers? Guess Mom & Pop Lorezeno shouldn’t charge so much for Cheetos. Double-digit profit margins? Where in the Constitution—which is also illegitimate—is making any profit assured?

Exacerbated anchor Martha MacCallum tried plucking something positive from Gordillo’s destructive wake, asking why his family fled the “communist guerillas” of Peru for the United States. The question was a feint. Its underlying inquiry was: “Why escape murderous leftists only to push for the same head-lopping, property-seizing distributionism in a capitalist country?”

Bless young Gustav, that dissective query went over his head like a misaimed AKM round. He softly stammered: “The economic situation in South America and Peru was in a really bad place… much of what we could say was responsible for that actually was the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism.” Ah, dreaded imperialism rears its rapacious head! Gordillo widens the hardship to all imperiled emigrants, asserting that the machinations of McDonald’s and Lockheed Martin “[bring] immigrants to the U.S. coming out of Latin America.”

So, migrants flee American caloric colonialism for…America. Toss logical consistency into the long train of cisheteronormative crimes against humanity. The Smithsonian already does.

All McCallum can offer is “that doesn’t make much sense.” Which is about how most political happenings go in the midsummer malaise. Socialists run amok while the bourgeoisie bronze themselves at the shore; Buffalo Bill makes an abortive bid for Congress; the President grinds a vengeful axe while an uncooperative regime squeezes the world oil market.

One month to go before the silliness finally burns off and it’s back to our normal level of inanity.

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.

By Cedric Keith

Currently, millions of acres of desiccated spruce, tamarack and birch are engulfed in the inferno that is the Canadian boreal forest. Maybe you’ve noticed, especially if you live in the northeast. It’s pretty bad this year but not an enormous departure from the trend of recent years.

“It’s really, really bad. It’s just so… I don’t know. I’m really worried about this. What are we doing to the planet now? I’m going to be ill.”

Hugh was enormously depressed by it all. I’d called to check in on my British friend and woodland fellow traveler, to make sure he wasn’t inhaling and to assure him that this is normal here in Pennsylvania: the skies become ashen about this season, things smell of maple leaf flambe´ and you find yourself wanting one of those N95 masks that seemed so popular a few years back. Hugh also holds to a certain set of politics which sees all environmental change as the fault of man, meaning that it all certainly needs to be rectified.

My first impulse was to point out that the year-upon-year fire menace of the Canadian forest was something managed by government – an ample and demonstrably ineffectual Canadian bureaucracy stewarding government lands. And a worsening conflagration is exactly what some of us expect from things managed by government. This is all in the hands of the Canadian forest fire bureaucracy. For those unfamiliar with this branch of true north’s permanent state, it’s kind of a make-work program for underemployed women with great sociology credentials, a smattering of ecology plaudits and winning stage presence. Again, some of us really expect these fires to worsen.

Yet, I’m determined not to take the low road today, striking at the obvious blunders of the Canadian aristocracy, kicking them while their country burns. I’d much rather talk about nature.

It’s likely that, if we’re forced to think about it, most of us, and especially Westerners, know that the aftermath of fire is renewal. The cones of certain conifers simply don’t open and disperse seeds without fire. A crowded understory sprouts again, starting its growth and primary production from zero. Sunlight reaches the forest floor in a way it hasn’t in a long time and the incumbent death of woody things releases a flush of nutrients, much of which ends up in the flowages draining these forests, stimulating invertebrate production. Most importantly, one of the finest edible mushrooms, the morel, proliferates in response to fire as one of the first signs of life, post-inferno. Incidentally, opportunities are opened for rock hounds and gold prospectors that would not be accessible in the pre-fire duff, scrub bushes and moss.

Forests that never burn might not be as idyllic as people want to imagine and forest managers today realize this. In the western United States, it’s become largely accepted that forests left to grow dense understories of tangled shrubberies and young trees become tinder boxes in which fires ignite more easily, spread more quickly and, importantly, burn more hotly, posing a greater menace to mature trees that might have survived passing fires otherwise.

In the bigger ecological picture though, fire is not an outlier, not something odd that doesn’t fit patterns seen elsewhere. Renewal brought about by cataclysm is hardly the exception, it’s the norm, integral to thinking right-headedly about our biome.

Fluvial flooding can be devastating, real horror story stuff, that scrapes Appalachian valleys bare and leaves no way of escape if valley inhabitants haven’t taken measures early. But it also, on an enormous scale, transports mountain forest nutrients and woody debris down to lower rivers and it radically re-routes flowages within their floodplains. Much would stagnate without this.

Trees fall regularly within a mature forest and, while it’s sad to see one of the big guys go down, its catastrophic departure opens a hole in the canopy for light penetration to up-and-coming trees. Fungi begin quickly to break the old-timers down (they were already working on their host trees before the fall) and we’ll have flushes of mushrooms shortly. As the trunks hollow with decay, homes are created for a community of animals from termites to bears.

If you’ve ever seen the aftermath of a tornado, where it tore through a forest with unimaginable shear and torsion, you’d probably be repulsed by the jumble of splintered oak, beech or pine. It’s not easily sauntered through. But return a few years later and you’ll find that this scar is now a green oasis apart from the monotonously dark shadow of the closed canopy all around. A wide variety of animals now choose this as a foraging site over the rest of the unperturbed woodland. (Utility rights-of-way can serve the same ecological purpose.)

Working on this piece, I’ve been rolling a fidget toy around in my fingers – just a rock I’m shaping and polishing right now. It’s not just any rock though, this is a piece of augen gneiss – arguably one of the oldest rocks on the planet. I found it where it had eroded out of a glacial deposit along lake Erie but it’s provenance was contemporaneous with the era in which cyano-bacteria ruled the planet, which is to say that this one was born at least a billion years before present. It’s hard, ornate and ancient. And it became what it is by passing through unimaginable cataclysms over unimaginable time: Volcanoes, mountain building, mountain destruction (of the ancient Laurentians), continental collision, glaciation, flood transport and all manner of grinding, collision, heat and pressure. This one has earned at least a good polish and a place on my shelf of awesomest rocks, if you’ll forgive the technical jargon.

Catalclysm is nature’s way, on short time scales and long.

And it’s not just one of the author’s many idle ruminations. It’s been institutionalized by evolutionary biologists as a key to “punctuated equilibrium,” which seems to mean that while evolution may proceed at a glacial pace through natural selection processes within stable environments, it’s the “disasters” that really shake things up, that really offer evolutionary opportunities for progress. Survival within radically upended environments forces creatures to adapt radically or die out.

Or maybe the evolutionary biologists borrowed the idea from 20th century economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter is credited with popularizing the idea of “Creative Destruction” which means all of the above pasted onto an economy instead of a forest. Schumpeter said, radically enough, that disasters and upheaval are not only aspects of a capitalist economy, they’re vital to its functioning. He went so far as to claim that Creative Destruction is the “essential fact about capitalism.” The cataclysms are features, not bugs and if the coercive power of government acts to protect existing technologies or industries, stagnation is guaranteed, progress is stunted. Which, by extension, may explain a great deal of the lackluster performance we witness in our own economy and maybe all of the lackluster performance of the British and Canadian economies.

“The essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process.”

-Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy)

In their best-selling 1997 work on the cycles of history, The Fourth Turning, authors William Strauss and Neil Howe claim that the fourth part of the century-long cycles of American history is a time of upheaval, disaster and peril in which old paradigms perish and new ideas that noone would have forecast a decade earlier, come to dominate. Their timing of things puts us right about in that “fourth turning” presently. And maybe we haven’t been thinking about things this way but destruction is happening all around us, in the political world and beyond, and its pace may be accelerating. The current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine are a good place to start with this devastation. The impending civil war in Great Britain is another. Closer to home, the far-reaching upheavals of the Trump years are another obvious example. COVID was hard to forget (and shouldn’t be forgotten). A lot of destruction, in myriad realms, is going to follow in the wake of AI implementation. Trust in institutions, for a full book’s worth of reasons, is historically low and falling. Strauss and Howe may have gotten this right.

But here’s the important thing about fourth turnings, ecological disasters and creative destruction: they precede a time of growth and opportunity we couldn’t have imagined in advance, rising from the ashes.

So, chin up, Hugh. Stay calm, carry on and let’s pay a visit to the charred northern wastelands next May for a nice basket of burn morels. Better days ahead and all that.

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.

By David Leach

When it comes to creating ways to rein in some of the enormous financial windfall being realized by the tech bros who make up Trump’s inner circle, J.D. Vance — Big Tech’s handpicked choice for the VP job — recently revealed that the socialist ideology of Bernie Sanders and the fascist politics of Donald Trump are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the idea of letting the US Government take controlling ownership of AI companies.

Specifically, Vance said that Trump ‘likes’ one of Sanders’ ideas for redistributing wealth — why does that sound familiar? — being realized from the massive profits of artificial intelligence companies (via The Mirror):

Vance, who is currently promoting a book about “finding [his] way back to faith,” took his pro-socialist/pro-fascist approach to the AI problem a step further by linking religion to the issue: “I think there’s like a deeply Christian concept to this,” he said. “There is a very deeply Christian concept that you have to give everybody in the country a seat at the table,” he explained.

While Trump, Vance, and MAGA will tell you that Trump and Sanders have nothing in common politically when it comes matters of corporate profits and wealth redistribution, it’s simply a fact that they are very simpatico in a host of areas.

For example, Trump announced the formation of the “U.S. Tech Force” in December 2025 to build out AI infrastructure using direct partnerships between private-sector tech giants and the federal government. The “U.S. Tech Force” consists of engineers and other specialists who will perform their tasks on behalf of the federal government, and includes nearly every Big Tech company you can think of (via Technocracy News):

Looking at the features of socialist and fascist ideologies, it’s quite clear that they have a specific common thread that links their desires for society (via Libertarian Europe):

Regarding these similarities, Ayn Rand wrote:

As I make clear in Chapter 14 of my book The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty, the marriage between Sanders’ socialism and Trump’s fascism isn’t all that unusual. In fact, it has been a reality for every president — Republican and Democrat — since 9/11. George W. Bush. Barack Obama. Donald Trump. Joe Biden. These four men — I refer to them as the founders of America’s police state — have worked in bipartisan fashion to destroy liberty.

The Big Tech/US Government partnership being promoted by the socialist ideology of Bernie Sanders and fascist policies of Donald Trump will ultimately give rise to an immortal dictator — a person who will have complete control of AI’s surveillance state.

While the scientific community has a lot to say about the world-altering impact of artificial intelligence on every aspect of our lives, they are eerily silent about its growing role in government and its destructive effect on our liberty, especially “the core democratic principles of privacy, autonomy, equality, the political process, and the rule of law.”

Trump has been quick to avail government of AI technology, but he has done little to nothing to ensure that the rights of the American people are protected. In fact, Trump’s AI ambitions have been marching on without any guardrails for transparency, accountability and adherence to the rule of law when it comes to the government’s use of the technology.

How do we protect liberty against the socialist ideology of Bernie Sanders and the fascist policies of Donald Trump when it comes to the development AI technology? The ability to do so may already be out of our hands. Here are just two examples:

In one of his first acts as president, Trump created the $2 trillion Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF), via executive order, to “help maximize the stewardship of our national wealth” and to “invest in great national endeavors for the benefit of all of the American people.” We have since learned that the SWF has the end goal of implementing Universal Basic Income in response to massive job displacement due to AI advancements.

Donald Trump and the Deep State he claims to be dismantling turbocharged the surveillance state when he equipped the FBI with AI surveillance drones with facial recognition and other spying technology.

Whatever you choose to call Bernie Sanders (leftist, socialist, Democratic Socialist, Communist) and Donald Trump (dictator, authoritarian, fascist, king) the creation of a government-owned tech sector is the likely future facing America unless we rein in the Republican/Democrat duopoly… NOW!

Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialogue. Feel free to leave a comment.