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President Calvin Coolidge regarded “a good budget as among the most noblest monuments of virtue.” Coolidge noted that a purpose of government was “securing greater efficiency in government by the application of the principles of the constructive economy, in order that there may be a reduction of the burden of taxation now borne by the American people. The object sought is not merely a cutting down of public expenditures. That is only the means. Tax reduction is the end.” For Coolidge, economy in government was not just policy, it was principle.
“Safe-Sane-Steady” was one of the campaign slogans used by President Calvin Coolidge during the 1924 presidential campaign. It also reflected Coolidge’s policies, and his landslide victory in the election demonstrated that the American people agreed. “Safe-Sane-Steady” can be applied to Governor Kim Reynolds.
Since entering office, whether it is fiscal or social policy, Governor Reynolds has pushed for common-sense conservative policies that place families and taxpayers first. Iowans agreed, and they have not only reelected Governor Reynolds twice but also expanded the Republican majority in the legislature each time. Once a “independent” state politically, Governor Reynolds has shifted the Hawkeye state in a more Republican direction.
Throughout her time in office, Reynolds has placed a priority on fiscal conservatism and making Iowa’s economy more competitive through tax reform, reducing the size and scope of government, and limiting the regulatory burden.
The governor has also been described as America’s “Margaret Thatcher.” She has not only defended the taxpayer but also opposed the progressive notion that government spending drives economic growth.
Reynolds has received numerous honors for her fiscal prudence, including the Distinguished Service Award from the Tax Foundation and the Linda S. Weindruch Award from the Iowa Taxpayers Association. She was also named a public official of the year by Governing magazine and twice recognized by the Cato Institute as the most fiscally conservative governor in the nation.
“When I first took office in 2017, Iowa’s top income tax rate was 8.98 percent, among the nation’s highest. So was our 12 percent corporate tax rate. Those taxes weren’t just numbers on a page. They were eating into paychecks, increasing the cost of doing business, and quietly making life more expensive for Iowa families. So, we took bold, decisive action,” stated Reynolds in her 2026 Condition of the State Address, reflecting on Iowa’s historic income tax reform.
Reynolds is in the process of concluding her final legislative session. Since 2017, she has led Iowa as a fiscal conservative. In 2022, the legislature passed the most significant reform of all, eliminating the multi-rate progressive income tax and replacing it with a single flat tax. That reform was accelerated in 2024, when lawmakers moved up the full phase-in and reduced the rate further — from 3.9 percent to 3.8 percent, which was fully implemented in 2025.
In just seven years, Iowa went from an income tax rate of nearly 9 percent to a flat 3.8 percent, representing a 60 percent reduction in the top rate. Iowa has since become a leader in the state “flat tax revolution,” with 14 states now operating under flat income tax systems.
Before these reforms, Iowa’s tax climate ranked among the worst in the nation, as reflected in the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index. Since then, Iowa has climbed an impressive 27 spots — from 44th to 17th — in the Tax Foundation’s 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index. Our state has even been recognized as leading the nation in tax cuts during the 21st century. “I’m proud to say, we’ve cut taxes more than any other state in the country,” proclaimed Reynolds.
Reducing tax rates is not just about economics or policy; it is about freedom, opportunity, and allowing individuals the ability to keep more of their hard-earned dollars. “That’s more than just a number, a ranking, or a percentage. It means more room in the budget for groceries. For school supplies. For a tank of gas, it means saving more, instead of falling a little further behind,” stated Governor Reynolds in describing the importance of Iowa’s flat tax.
Further, the governor stated that “in Iowa, we believe the money you earn is better used for your family than your government.”
Iowa’s flat tax did not emerge overnight. Its origins trace back to the passage of the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017, which catalyzed tax reform efforts across the states. In Iowa, that momentum translated into a renewed focus on income tax reform, beginning with a package of tax cuts passed in 2018.
At the time, Iowa’s tax climate was deeply uncompetitive. The state imposed a progressive individual income tax with a top rate of 8.98 percent and a corporate income tax rate of 12 percent, which was the highest in the nation. The 2018 tax reform package, the first major overhaul of Iowa’s income tax system in two decades, marked the beginning of a sustained reform effort. It cut rates across the board and modernized the tax code by broadening the sales tax base, a change that helped stabilize revenues and reduced reliance on income taxes.
Over the next several years, lawmakers built on that foundation. Reforms included phasing down the corporate income tax to a flat 5.5 percent, eliminating the inheritance tax, and addressing property tax pressures. Each step followed the same principle: lower rates, a broader base, and disciplined spending.
Iowa’s tax reforms were made possible not by gimmicks or temporary surpluses, but by sustained fiscal discipline and conservative budgeting. Prudent budgeting is at the heart of sound fiscal policy.
“Not every state is doing this or even can because of poor budgeting and runaway spending,” stated Reynolds in describing some of Iowa’s neighbors, such as Minnesota and Illinois. These states, among others, have done the opposite of Iowa, that is, they have repeatedly increased taxes and spending.
As a result of conservative budgeting, Iowa emerged out of the COVID pandemic as one of the stronger economies and fiscal foundations. Since Reynolds has been in office, Iowa has been running budget surpluses, the reserve accounts have been full, and the Taxpayer Relief Fund has a $4 billion balance.
Reynolds also understands that conservative budgeting is the foundation of sustainable tax reform. “But it’s not enough just to cut taxes. You have to make them sustainable, especially if you want to keep bringing them down. The growth they create helps, but you also have to keep spending in check,” argues Reynolds. This is a lesson many states and the federal government have yet to learn.
Fiscal conservatism is not just about pro-growth tax reform — it must also include limiting spending and reducing the size of government. This is why the governor has made reforming government a priority.
As part of her fiscal policy agenda, she was able to get the legislature to approve two major government reorganization measures. This was the first effort to reform state government in 40 years. The first reform measure centered on consolidating and reducing departments within the executive branch, while the second focused on reducing and consolidating the number of boards and commissions.
“When we started our alignment work in 2022, state operations hadn’t been reviewed in forty years — and it showed. Layers of bureaucracy had accumulated over decades, expanding government beyond its core function, keeping us from working effectively as one team, and hampering our service to Iowans. We were too big, too fractured, and too inefficient,” stated Reynolds.
Both government reform measures worked to limit government and improve service delivery. “We’ve transformed the way our State interacts with citizens, businesses, and entrepreneurs,” Reynolds explained. “We consolidated agencies (from 37 to 16), eliminated 1,200 burdensome regulations, remade legacy systems, centralized programs, and leveraged technology.” These reforms have already saved taxpayers $217 million, exceeding original projections within the first 18 months.
Before the reform, Iowa had 256 boards and commissions; now, 83 have been eliminated, and others consolidated. In initiating this reform, Governor Reynolds asked fundamental questions that all policymakers should consider at every level of government:
“What is the core mission of each agency? How is it funded? How is it staffed and what does it own? Are the agency’s programs working? How did the structure of the agency compare to other states? Where is there duplication or misalignment? What can we cut? These questions align with the principles of priority-based budgeting.”
Governor Reynolds stated, “Like any large organization, government is marked by bureaucracy’s natural tendency to grow. If that growth isn’t constantly checked and rechanneled toward its core function, it quickly takes on a life of its own.”
Fiscal policy has been a central part of Governor Reynolds’ agenda: “We reduced taxes — saving Iowans more than $24 billion over 10 years. No more tax on retirement income. No inheritance tax. And starting this month [January 2025], Iowans get to keep even more of the money they earn, with a 3.8 percent flat tax — a far cry from the 8.98 percent of six years ago.”
The governor also launched Iowa’s DOGE task force, modeled after her efforts to reform state government. “I like to say that we were doing DOGE before DOGE was a thing,” stated Reynolds.
Working throughout 2025, the DOGE taskforce had a unique task of not just trying to find taxpayer savings at the state level, but more importantly focus on reforming local government. The reason for the focus on cities and counties is Iowa’s escalating property tax burden.
She noted that “over the last two years, property taxes have gone up more than 10 percent.” However, this has been a problem that has only accelerated. Over the past 20 years, property taxes in Iowa have increased by over 107 percent, which exceeds the growth of inflation and population.
“Whether you live in a small town, growing suburb, or an urban neighborhood, you’ve probably felt it. Property taxes are rising faster than inflation, faster than paychecks, and faster than population growth,” she stated.
Although Iowa has made tremendous progress on income tax reform and on making the tax code more competitive, property taxes are still a deterrent to growth. “As we’re seeing property taxes escalating, people are leaving rural Iowa because they can’t afford to stay,” she argued.
Iowa’s 3.8 percent flat tax is not only making the tax code more competitive, but it is also attracting more investment into Iowa. “Today, the momentum is real. Despite a challenging global economy, we’ve attracted over $20 billion in new capital investment since 2024, creating new jobs and new opportunities,” stated Governor Reynolds.
The high property tax burden is impacting economic growth, especially in rural Iowa. Property tax relief is essential to reversing this trend. “That’s part of the equation, too. We need to hopefully grow the population in rural Iowa,” noted Governor Reynolds.
Reynolds defined the cause of Iowa’s property tax problem and the solution. “So, this year, we need to go after the real driver of the problem: Spending. Spending is what drives taxes — always has, always will. And the most reliable way to protect taxpayers is to limit the growth of government itself,” stated Reynolds.
For that reason, the starting point for any sound tax policy discussion must be spending restraint. Governor Reynolds is calling for a 2 percent property tax cap, which would allow for new construction to be included. Once again, she is correct that government spending is the direct cause of Iowa’s property tax problem.
She hopes to conclude her final legislative session with a property tax reform measure that will finally begin to provide property tax relief for Iowans. She also had the goal of eliminating Iowa’s income tax; however, because of the national economic situation, she will not be able to fulfill that goal.
Nevertheless, Reynolds is already the most significant governor in Iowa’s history to fully engage and implement conservative fiscal policy. As governor, she also reflected the spirit of Coolidge in fighting for the preservation of traditional values and the rule of law. Whether it was through the COVID pandemic or natural disasters, the governor always made sure to protect the liberties of Iowans. In an era when states are addicted to federal funds, Governor Reynolds tried to advocate for greater state flexibility in terms of funding or outright refusing funds.
Governor Reynolds reflected the values of Coolidge. In our current era, when fiscal conservatives are increasingly rare, she has demonstrated that it is possible to govern successfully on a platform of “economy in government.”
READ MORE from John Hendrickson:
Republic or Democracy: Democrats’ Crusade to ‘Save Our Democracy’ Is a Ploy to Undermine Our Constitution
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John Hendrickson serves as Policy Director for Iowans for Tax Relief Foundation.
Image licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

I’ve spent the last couple of days visiting a farm as part of my fieldwork for this article. The war in Iran is threatening the global economy, and maybe that’s the excuse you needed to finally do something truly enjoyable: start your own farm and tell inflation — and rubbery supermarket chicken — to go to hell. Take notes.
The essential feature of any farm is the smell. The one thing all farms in the world have in common is that they stink. What distinguishes them from a landfill is that the living creatures are generally larger, recognizable, and don’t have multiple heads. You can’t buy bad smells anywhere, but they’re easy enough to produce: just get yourself some animals — skunks, alive; fish, dead — and scatter them around your yard on a hot day.
When choosing your animals, think about what kind of meat or eggs — male mammals excluded — you’d like to see on your plate.
Cows
Cows are the one thing that can turn your ramshackle chicken coop into a proper farm. An animal of that size, domesticated, inspires admiration in visitors and earns the respect of neighbors.
Cows are extraordinary creatures and understand human language remarkably well. If you let a cow loose in a field and tell it “Eat!” it will immediately begin eating. If you don’t tell it, it will eat anyway. Their discipline is exquisite.
Moving a well-fed cow is no easy task, which has made them extremely lazy. As a result, their main occupation is lying in the sun with their udders on display. If you want to be a proper farmer, it’s important to learn the correct livestock terminology. You don’t call them “boobs.”
Dogs
Farm dogs should be kept to a minimum. I recommend one — and a thoroughly ill-tempered one at that. Its job is to nip at the cows’ tails and terrorize the chickens into moving around the farm so you don’t have to get up and whack them with a stick. Train the dog properly and let it handle everything.
Sheep
Sheep are rather impertinent. When they’re not sheared, they ruin the pastoral landscape, and those little white blobs on green grass quickly become the corniest image imaginable outside the city. Which is precisely why we shear them.
Communicating with sheep is extremely difficult because their entire alphabet consists of two letters: “b” and “a.” They only ever use them in one direction — “baa.” You will never hear a sheep cry “aaabbb!” unless you’ve left an open bottle of whiskey within reach. Over time, however, they’ve developed the remarkable ability to stretch that final vowel indefinitely, adjusting the length of their bleating according to their needs.
Quick guide to interpreting sheep:
Baa = I’m hungry and sleepy.
Baaaaaa = I’m hungry and sleepy.
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa = I’m hungry and sleepy.
Chickens
Chickens chatter like parrots, make a mess of everything, and strut around with a defiant air. The good thing about them is that they lay eggs. And from those eggs come more chickens. It’s quite extraordinary. They could keep this up indefinitely. I suspect they have a plan to take over the world.
Pigs
Pigs provide the essential smell that keeps your farm from smelling merely like cows, sheep, or chickens. Once you raise pigs, everything smells like pigs. They also function as an excellent human repellent. Unfortunately, they have the opposite effect on insects.
Donkeys
Donkeys are loyal and good-natured. They’re a great help with farm work, and their stubbornness and perseverance are well known. Besides, they don’t smell too bad — especially compared to pigs. Donkeys have only one real danger: they bite. A very foolish friend of mine once had a finger bitten clean off by a donkey. It was, strictly speaking, an act of cannibalism.
Daily life on a farm is as entertaining as it is exhausting. From morning till night, there’s always something to do. And if there isn’t, it’s the perfect moment to start chopping firewood for winter. There is always wood to chop. Here are some of the key activities to round out your day:
Getting an Egg
If you have chickens, this is fairly straightforward. Walk into the coop, grab a hen, and climb onto a stack of crates so all the others can see you. Draw your sword, cut off her head, and declare: “This one didn’t lay any eggs! The rest of you have 24 hours!”
By the next day, the coop will be overflowing with eggs.
Chickens are very clever. To check whether the eggs are really yours or whether one of them placed a bulk order at the supermarket, take an egg and crush it underfoot in front of them. If one of them starts crying, the eggs are yours. If they all laugh, you’ve been had.
Milking a Cow
Too unpleasant. Try persuading the calves to do it for you.
Killing a Pig
I don’t think there’s a more unpleasant experience in life than killing a pig. In the countryside, it’s done in a way that is both cruel and distressing — for the pig and for those present. A gentleman would never do such a thing.
To slaughter a pig with proper civility and elegance, paint a target around its tail, release it into the yard, dust off your old Winchester ’73, drink half a bottle of vodka, and put on a The Rolling Stones record at full blast. The rest will take care of itself
Going to the City
After 48 hours on a farm, you’ll be desperate to get back to the city, put on clean clothes, and breathe some carbon dioxide. Then you’ll spend hours stuck in traffic because of some damn anti-war march about Iran, watch the whole parade of idiots go by, and decide to head straight back to the farm as soon as possible —  to surround yourself with pigs, who smell just as bad but at least don’t support the ayatollahs.
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There is a growing, if tentative, sense that Cuba may be approaching an inflection point. Rapidly mounting economic stress owing to losing its Venezuelan oil lifeline, persistent shortages, outward migration, and quiet policy experimentation suggest that the island could rapidly begin moving, however unevenly, toward more market-oriented arrangements in the months ahead. These shifts may not resemble a clean “transition” in the textbook sense. They may come piecemeal: expanded private enterprise here, currency reform there, selective liberalization of trade or investment. But the direction of travel matters more than the speed. After decades of rigid central planning, even incremental movement toward markets would mark a profound change. (RELATED: Darkness Before the Light in Cuba)
However such changes unfold, it is difficult to argue that they would not, on balance, improve conditions for Cubans and, by extension, the world at large. We may debate the sequencing, the political compromises, or the degree of continuity with the existing regime. But the baseline reality is impossible to ignore: when citizens, often with children, risk their lives crossing 90 miles of shark-infested, open water on makeshift, rickety boards, the status quo is untenable. A society that ceases to generate such desperate exits is, almost by definition, a society that is improving. If liberalization reduces the need for that kind of flight — even modestly — it will be a meaningful step forward.
Precisely because such a moment may be approaching, it is worth revisiting the interpretive mistakes that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. That episode was not just an economic and political transformation; it was also a narrative failure. Many of the most widely repeated explanations for the Soviet system’s demise were either incomplete or outright wrong, and those misinterpretations have shaped expectations and public understanding in ways that blunted the perceived success of market transitions. If Cuba begins to open, getting the story right will matter; not only for historians, but for policymakers, economists, investors, and the Cuban people themselves.
The problem is not isolation, but the means by which resources are allocated once they arrive.
One of the most persistent errors concerns the role of external constraints versus internal dysfunction. In Cuba’s case, the U.S. embargo is frequently cited as the primary cause of economic hardship. But this explanation does not withstand scrutiny. Cuba trades with numerous countries, including major economies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Goods flow onto the island; tourists arrive; remittances circulate. The problem is not isolation, but the means by which resources are allocated once they arrive. Chronic shortages, low productivity, and poor quality goods are hallmarks of a system that systematically misallocates capital and labor — not one that is simply cut off from the world. To attribute Cuba’s economic stagnation primarily to the embargo is to misunderstand the underlying mechanisms at work.
A similar pattern of misinterpretation characterized explanations of the Soviet collapse. One common claim is that “no one had any incentive to work,” as if the system failed merely because of widespread laziness or moral decline. Incentives certainly mattered, but this framing trivializes the deeper problem. Even with well-intentioned and industrious workers, a centrally planned system lacks the ability to coordinate complex economic activity effectively.
Another popular explanation is that the United States, particularly under Ronald Reagan, forced the Soviet Union into effective ‘bankruptcy’ by compelling it to overspend on military competition. While geopolitical pressure played a role, it was not the root cause of the collapse. The Soviet economy was already stagnating under the weight of systemic inefficiencies long before defense spending became unsustainable. These narratives, though superficially appealing, distract from more fundamental issues.
There were, of course, many real and serious challenges in the post-communist transitions of Russia and Eastern Europe. Rapid privatization without well-defined property rights, weak legal institutions, corruption, and the absence of financial infrastructure all contributed to uneven and, at times, painful outcomes. These factors should not be dismissed. They offer important lessons about the stages and institutional prerequisites of successful market reform. But they should not obscure the core reason why the socialist systems themselves failed in the first place.
At the foundation of that failure were two interrelated problems identified decades earlier. The first, articulated by Ludwig von Mises, is the problem of economic calculation. Without market prices generated through voluntary exchange, planners lack the means to determine the relative value of different uses of resources. They cannot know whether steel should go to bridges or machinery, whether labor should shift from agriculture to manufacturing, or which technologies are worth adopting. The second, emphasized by Friedrich Hayek, is the knowledge problem: the information required to make such decisions is dispersed, tacit, and constantly changing. It cannot be aggregated and processed by a central authority in any meaningful way.
As more information about Cuba’s internal economic conditions becomes available — whether through greater openness, increased private activity, or simple leakage of data — it will likely reinforce these insights. The island’s difficulties are not mysterious, nor are they primarily the result of external pressure. They are the predictable consequences of a system that cannot calculate effectively and cannot harness the knowledge embedded in millions of individual decisions.
If Cuba is indeed on the cusp of change, then the stakes are not only economic but interpretive. The world will once again be tempted to explain outcomes through simplistic narratives, blaming external forces for internal failures or attributing success to anything other than the emergence of markets and the institutions that support them. It would be a mistake to repeat that pattern. Making the causes of collectivism’s repeated failure clear is not only a moral imperative, but underscores the promise of liberalization and the reasons why it matters.
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Sometimes, after reading that hash of mendacity and advocacy called the news, spattered with the opinions of people who cannot write two sentences without vulgarity, obscenity, flippancy, and self-satisfied ignorance, I turn to my books. I am reading Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset, a wonderful exercise in probing the shifting currents of human motives, and the grounds, often as firm as quicksand, on which we judge what those motives in any particular case may be. Trollope shows how rarely we get them right, even when we direct our thoughts toward ourselves, whom we presumably ought to know best.
Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s wife, does not know that she is a vulgar, ignorant virago, and that all her showy devotion to the Church is but the thinnest veil over self-will and the lust to have everyone truckle to her demands. The hero of the novel, the poverty-stricken curate Mr. Crawley, is courageous but moody and as far from ingratiating as he can be. Thus, he is often his own worst enemy, his very virtues preventing him from dealing with the usual worldly brew of a little virtue mingled with a great deal of self-regard; nor is he without some pride of his own.
Trollope could not match the madcap genius of Charles Dickens, whom he once satirized as “Mr. Popular Sentiment,” nor did he have the knack of creating such a gallery of immortal characters as Dickens did, who in this regard in the history of literature was second only to Shakespeare. But he wrote of the ordinary people you might meet in an English provincial town, from the aristocrats to the laborers, and his attitude toward the wicked was characterized not by fascination with their evil, nor by that loathing which is sometimes an overreaction against the fascination. It was rather a severe pity. After all, what should we feel when we see a human being made in the image of God destroying himself by his own self-produced and self-administered poison?
What man can write sensibly about anything when he is all in a lather of self-justification and hatred?
That Trollope’s novels are set in Victorian England, and that they have so much to do with matters of Church and State, matters largely settled long before I was born — whether settled well or not is another question — is all to his advantage, and mine too, for that matter. It is not our world of political madness, nor is it some dystopian world, a bad dream caused by consuming too much of that madness. What man can write sensibly about anything when he is all in a lather of self-justification and hatred? Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a cliché-ridden fever dream, born of bigotry against evangelical Christians, fashionable bigotry in the urban enclaves of Ontario. She had done better to move to one of the islands off the coast of Newfoundland and listen to the stories the old fishermen had to tell. Something like that is what Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings did, moving to the swamp country of northern Florida, getting to know the farmers, their language, their ways, and their earthy tales. It was the same with Jack London in the Klondike, or with Sir Walter Scott and the ruins of old Scotland that he saw wherever he turned. The best position to be in, if you are a reader and you are willing to have your heart and mind be moved, is to encounter the half-familiar, what is firmly rooted in a human world you can approach, but not the world you are in the midst of, with its confusions and your own passions to distract you.
To put it another way, to the extent that an author of fiction or poetry writes specifically for what he knows will be considered “relevant,” that is, a part of the current wrangling and noise, he will be consigning his work to irrelevance, because once that wrangling and noise have subsided, or turned toward another object, there will be little left to his work. Virgil wrote his Aeneid, apparently, because Augustus Caesar urged him to do so, thinking of it as a part of his aim to reform the morals of the Roman state, reestablishing the virtue of pietas as central to all that Rome strove to be at her best. Yet what Virgil wrote is hardly propaganda, and its situation as “in” Rome yet not in Rome, because it would be a long time before the actual founding of the city, gives us likewise a half-familiar world from whose vantage we can learn about our own world, not least because we can learn about our own selves. For what we say about our motives is one thing, and what our motives really are is usually something else. Does a god rouse in me this dreadful desire, says Nisus on the evening of his disastrous night-sortie with his youthful friend Euryalus, “or do men make gods of their own desires?” Virgil leaves that question unanswered.
One might hope that our schools and colleges would provide shelters against the ubiquitous tale “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing,” as Macbeth puts it, his false world of ambition in ruins all around him. Alas, they do precisely the opposite. They invite the madness in. You cannot simply study the works of Anthony Trollope, with the leisure of mind and heart that they both require and reward. It must be Trollope and feminism, Trollope and Victorian economics, Trollope and prison reform, Trollope and the Liberals, Trollope and the Tories, Trollope and ecclesiastical hypocrisy — Trollope and anything other than the creature himself, man. Eventually, though, as Trollope is not a kind of putty to be stretched and punched into the desired shapes, he will be set aside in favor of the second-rate and third-rate rabble of his time, whose intellectual caliber and artistic skills are not so formidable. And then the English teachers and professors find, to their astonishment, that though the madness is attractive in the moment, it can be gotten much cheaper from the phenomena of the masses, and not at all adulterated with some little admixture of judgment and taste. So we find — just to take English as an example, though much the same can be said about the humanities generally — that what was once a vibrant and popular major is now nearly dead, raddled with self-inflicted diseases, bleeding internally, foul of breath, and foggy in the brain.
Can the discipline be reformed and brought back to health and vigor? Not with the doctors in charge. They detest the notion that you might read Trollope and not have anything political to do with him. What good is a human voice speaking calmly and rationally? How do peace and quiet advance whatever grand new revolution in human affairs we must advance, or else? I wonder sometimes whether they have actually read anything at all, in the way Trollope must be read; in the way any truly excellent poet or novelist or playwright must be read, if reading him is to be more than gazing into a mirror, or scribbling down a sentence here or there, out of context, to be shouted through a megaphone.
What we need are, basically, true schools and colleges, places free of the current distractions, places where intellectual relaxation and concentration are two forms of the same thing. No one is relaxed at a political rally, and therefore, no one can concentrate his mind there, either. At such events, one may be concentrated from without, as the stuff of an orange into a can, or gunpowder into the mouth of a cannon, but you can no more reason about what is good and true than the powder can decide not to explode. But who among us has had any experience of a school or a college characterized by that inward human peace? Most people below a certain age have never known it. They above all need liberation from the falsely relevant, that is, liberation from the noise, so quickly raised and so soon passed by, so that they can be free to ponder truths about man and God, which never go out of fashion. Then they might just be able to read The Last Chronicle of Barset.
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For the first time in modern American life, nearly half of young men in Gen Z report that they are not dating at all. This is not simply a pause in the so‑called “hookup culture” of the 1990s and early 2000s; it is a sign of something deeper and much more troubling. The retreat of young men from relationships is not a victory for chastity or a sign of renewed seriousness about commitment. Instead, it reflects a generation of young men who feel increasingly uncertain about their place in a culture that often treats them as unnecessary — or even unwelcome.
A survey conducted by the non-partisan, non-profit Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, found that only 56 percent of Gen Z adults — and 54 percent of Gen Z men — said they were involved in a romantic relationship at any point during their teenage years. This represents a remarkable change from previous generations, where teenage dating was much more common. More than three-quarters of Baby Boomers (78 percent) and Generation Xers (76 percent) report having had a boyfriend or girlfriend as teenagers. Forty-four percent of Gen Z men today report having no relationship experience at all during their teen years. This is double the rate for older men.
College campuses, once caricatured as hotbeds of casual sexual encounters, now show a very different reality. Surveys indicate that students are dating less, pairing off less, and even socializing less. The old script of “hookup culture” has collapsed — and that is a good thing — but nothing healthy has replaced it. What remains is a growing population of young men who are isolated, risk‑averse, and unsure how to form relationships in an environment that often frames male romantic interest as presumptively suspect.
The reasons for this retreat are widely misunderstood. Many of those publishing essays or news stories about this in the media — including contributors to the New York Times — have tried to blame video games, pornography, or a supposed decline in ambition for young men, but these explanations miss the deeper structural forces that have reshaped the lives of young men. Many male students came of age in an environment where they were treated less as participants in campus life and more as potential liabilities.
They created a climate of fear and suspicion in which ordinary social interactions carried outsized risks.
The moral panic of the #MeToo Movement, where every male was vulnerable to false charges of sexual assault or harassment, coupled with the draconian Obama-era Title IX adjudication systems that dominated universities throughout his administration, replete with campus tribunals and star chamber proceedings, chilled campus relationships as males became fearful of the growing climate of hostility they faced. These campus courts operated with low evidentiary standards and opaque procedures that left many young men feeling vulnerable. Although the campus star chambers have largely disappeared — mostly because of lawsuits against universities brought by wrongly accused male students, aided by civil liberties groups and judges concerned about the lack of due process — they left a lasting mark on campus culture. The kangaroo courts did more than resolve misconduct cases; they created a climate of fear and suspicion in which ordinary social interactions carried outsized risks.
For many young men, the message was unmistakable: initiating a conversation, expressing interest, or even participating in mixed‑sex social life could jeopardize their education and reputation. In such a climate, withdrawal became a rational response, not a sign of immaturity.
The effects of this climate were subtle at first, but over time they reshaped the social instincts of an entire cohort of young men. When ordinary interactions — introducing oneself at a party, asking a classmate to coffee, even offering a compliment — were framed as potential misconduct or harassment, many young men responded by withdrawing from social interactions with young women altogether. What had once been normal rites of passage began to feel like crossing a battlefield dotted with landmines.
Instead of learning how to navigate the awkward but essential steps of courtship, young men learned avoidance. They learned that the safest path was to keep their distance and stay away from danger. And as these habits took root, the broader culture mistook this retreat for apathy or immaturity, when in reality it was a rational adaptation to an environment that treated male initiative as a problem to be managed rather than a virtue to be cultivated.
This climate has also helped fuel the rise of the “looksmaxxing” movement, where young men obsess over grooming, fitness, skincare, jawlines, and every imaginable detail of their appearance. On the surface, it may look like vanity, but it reflects something deeper: a basic insecurity and a reversal of the traditional dynamics of courtship.
For generations, young women were the ones who invested enormous effort into their appearance because they expected young men to pursue them. Today, many young men believe the only safe path is to make themselves so visually appealing that women will initiate contact instead — relieving them of the burden, and the perceived danger, of making the first move. Looksmaxxing becomes a strategy for navigating a social world where male initiative is treated with suspicion. In a culture that has discouraged young men from approaching young women, they have turned inward, trying to perfect themselves in the hope that someone else will take the first step.
This shift has reshaped the experience of young women as well. When men retreat from initiating relationships and instead focus on perfecting their appearance in the hope that women will pursue them, the traditional dance of courtship breaks down. Women, who once expected to be approached, now find themselves in a social world where the signals are muted, the roles are blurred, and genuine connection is much harder to make. The result is confusion and disappointment on both sides. Instead of fostering mutual confidence, the new dynamic encourages self‑consciousness and second‑guessing. Women sense the hesitation and withdrawal, and many interpret it as disinterest, not realizing it is often rooted in fear. The collapse of clear relational norms leaves both sexes lonelier, more isolated, and less able to form the stable relationships that once served as the foundation for adulthood.
Gen Z social influencer, Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, and one of the most famous of the looksmaxxers, recently told a reporter for the New York Times that knowing he could have sex with a woman was better than the sex itself. Pursuing beauty at all costs, Clavicular revealed to a GQ Magazine reporter that he began injecting steroids he purchased online at age 14 to build his body, takes crystal meth to depress his appetite, and claims to have smashed his face with a hammer to make the bones regrow sharper. Clavicular was expelled from Sacred Heart University during his first semester there as a freshman when drugs were found in his dorm room — but none of this has dampened his influence on young men who seem desperate to perfect themselves.
High schools and colleges have done little to reverse this collapse in social connection. And in some cases, they have unintentionally made it worse. A recent example from an all‑girls high school in New England illustrates the problem. The school hosted a spring dance for its female students but chose not to invite male students from a nearby all-boys’ school, even though the two institutions had long been natural counterparts and had enjoyed dances together in the past. Administrators encouraged the girls to “bring a date,” but most of the first and second-year female students did not have boyfriends and arrived at the dance dressed in adorable outfits with no boys to dance with and no opportunity to meet anyone new.
Instead of fostering the kinds of low‑stakes social interactions (once called high school or college mixers) that had historically helped young people build confidence and learn the basics of dating, the school created a sad event that left young girls standing alone on the sidelines or dancing as a group with the same girls they see every day in class.  This was not the fault of the students; it was the result of administrative decisions that prioritized caution over connection.
If there is any hope of reversing these trends, high schools and colleges must reclaim their role in helping young people form the relationships that make adult life possible. For generations, educational institutions understood that part of their mission — whether explicitly stated or not — was to create the social conditions in which young men and women could meet, interact, and learn the rhythms of mutual respect and affection. When institutions fail to create environments where young men and young women can meet naturally and safely, they contribute to the loneliness and relational paralysis now defining a generation.
Rebuilding healthy relationships does not require a return to the past — no one wants to return to the hookup culture of the past. But it does require courage. It means restoring mixed‑sex social events that are genuinely welcoming. It means teaching young men and women how to interact with one another not as adversaries or potential threats, or the sex objects of the toxic hook-up days, but as fellow human beings capable of friendship, affection, and commitment. Most of all, it means acknowledging that human flourishing depends on relationships — and that institutions have a responsibility to cultivate the conditions in which those relationships can form and begin to flourish.
READ MORE from Anne Hendershott:
The Manufactured Crisis Over Housing Pregnant Migrant Minors in Texas
The Doomsday Clock Is Running on Politics, Not Science
The President Who Delivered Dobbs Deserves Better From the Pro-Life Movement

First-Ever Look At America’s Classified RQ-180 Stealth Drone?

The world is seemingly at war. With multi-front conflicts raging in Eastern Europe and intensifying in the Middle East, this period of elevated World War III risk has coincided with the emergence of some of America’s most advanced stealth aircraft.

The latest sighting comes from the Greek news website OnLarissa, which reports that a planespotter captured a “mysterious” stealth-bomber-like aircraft operating near Larissa, Greece, near the Hellenic Air Force (HAF) base.

The local outlet stated, “The ferocious warplane was reportedly parked due to a malfunction at the 110th Fighter Wing military airfield,” adding that the plane was likely an “American superweapon, the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit.”

However, well-seasoned US-based journalists who specialize in aviation and military coverage at The Aviationist disagree with OnLarissa’s assessment that the plane is the B-2 Spirit. In fact, they suggest this could be the first-ever glimpse of the highly classified, next-generation stealth surveillance drone, the RQ-180, developed by Northrop Grumman.

“The closest match we can find, corroborated by anonymous sources with some familiarity with the clandestine jet, is with the famous (yet still classified) intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance UAV operated by the U.S. Air Force that we have come to know as the RQ-180,” The Aviationist reporter Kai Greet wrote in a note.

Greet pointed out, “Larissa is no stranger to a U.S. military presence, and has hosted MQ-9 Reaper detachments on an ongoing basis. It does remain unclear, though, if these images genuinely depict an RQ-180.” 

Across the Atlantic and over the Mojave Desert, a planespotter captured what he believed was the USAF testing the B-21 Raider stealth bomber earlier this week (view here).

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/20/2026 – 21:50

Someone was playing possum — or stuffed animal.Among plush kangaroos, dingoes and Tasmanian devils ready to be bought by parents of antsy children, a live brushtail possum waited in a gift shop at an Australian airport this week.The wild animal was first noticed by a shopper in the store on Wednesday, retail manager Liam Bloomfield of Hobart Airport in the state of Tasmania said.”A passenger reported it to …. one of the staff members on shift who couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing,” Bloomfield told The Associated Press. “She then called the (airport) management and said we’ve got a possum in the store.”TOURISTS IN LAS VEGAS PAY $1,000 FOR DINNER ON THE STRIP WHILE SHARKS EAT LIKE ROYALTYStaff at the airport were able to remove the animal without harming it.”I’m imaging it saw some of the plush animals that were for sale on the shelf and it decided to make its home with those,” Bloomfield joked of why the possum was hiding with the stuffed toys. “It wanted to blend in.”EXPERT SOUNDS ALARM AFTER STUDY FINDS POPULAR TRAVEL ITEM CARRIES FAR MORE BACTERIA THAN EXPECTED”Can you spot the imposter?” the airport wrote in a Facebook post Thursday that showed the possum curled up in a cubby with its stuffed counterparts.”This cheeky lost possum found a clever hiding place among the Aussie plushies in our retail store,” the airport continued. “Luckily it was safely relocated out of the terminal area and the space was cleaned.”Bloomfield said the possum not only found a way into the airport but also their hearts.”We’ll have a little shrine to the possum,” he revealed, according to The Independent. “There will be a nice little photo; once it gets a name, we will put a nice little post in front of the store to make sure it’s remembered.”

Screencap of Twitter/X video.
Democrats are openly saying that they are going to go after Trump and members of his administration.
The same people who have accused Trump of enacting ‘revenge’ on his opponents are now plainly stating their intentions to do just that, enact revenge. And of course, the media lets them get away with it.
Today on The Five, Greg Gutfeld called out the Democrats over this, wondering what exactly they want revenge for.
“The Dems are talking about revenge. For what? Was it for closing the border? Getting rid of the Fentanyl from our cities? Uhh, putting away killers and rapists? Exposing waste, fraud and abuse? Destroying a foreign threat to our country? Exposing the lie of trans athletes? If you’re seeking revenge for that, what’s it say about you?
If you’re being honest, you only want revenge because you lost.”
Watch the clip:

“The Dems are seeking revenge…for what?” Essentially for Trump bringing us back to reality, as Greg brilliantly spells it out here. Rush would crown Greg as the new Mayor of Realville. pic.twitter.com/doLjvf2Nbs
— David Asman (@DavidAsmanfox) March 20, 2026

Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker is pushing something called Project 2029.
FOX News reports:
Pritzker pushes prosecutions of Trump officials as part of Dem ‘Project 2029’ agenda
Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker said Democrats should seek criminal prosecution against Trump administration and law enforcement officials who have “broken the law” if they were to gain control of the White House in 2028.
Pritzker, who is running for a third gubernatorial term, sat down for an interview with The New York Times and proposed Democrats adopt their own version of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy blueprint for presidential administrations released in nearly every election cycle since the 1980s.
Pritzker dubbed the Democrats’ counter “Project 2029,” urging it to be quickly implemented to “restore the rule of law.”
“I don’t think you can speak of it in shorthand, but we’ve got to restore the rule of law, and that means holding people accountable who’ve broken the law,” Pritzker said. “I’m talking about the people in this administration who’ve broken the law and federal agents who’ve broken the law.”
New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Pritzker whether this meant Trump officials and law enforcement agents would face criminal prosecution.
“Criminally prosecuted, civilly prosecuted,” Pritzker said. “Whatever it is that we can do.”
Everything is an outrage and a destruction of our norms, until Democrats do it.
Then it’s perfectly fine.
The post Greg Gutfeld Torches Democrats for Seeking Revenge: ‘For What?’ (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

Nicholas Brendon, who starred as Xander Harris on the hit TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” throughout its seven-season run, dies at age 54.

President Donald Trump stated Friday that the United States is closing in on its objectives in Iran and that his administration is considering winding down the war. 
The post Trump Says U.S. Considering ‘Winding Down’ Iran War appeared first on Breitbart.