Before he was a franchise, an action icon, or a friend to presidents, Sylvester Stallone was a broke twenty-nine-year-old with $106 in the bank and a script nobody wanted to make with him in it. What he built instead of taking the easy money became one of the purest expressions of the American spirit ever…
America First
The five largest technology companies in America will spend roughly $725 billion building AI infrastructure this year alone. A landmark MIT study found that 95 percent of the enterprise projects that infrastructure is meant to support delivered no measurable financial return at all. Meanwhile, a hardware store owner who spent forty dollars a month on…
Roughly half of new businesses close within five years. Businesses acquired from a retiring owner survive at closer to 70 to 80 percent over that same span, and when purchased with an SBA loan, default at less than a third the rate of a brand-new venture. Meanwhile, a wave of retiring baby boomers is about…
"Most owners come to me already wrong about what their business is worth," one longtime business advisor put it plainly. "Not by a little. By a factor of two, sometimes three." That gap between the number an owner has carried in his head for years and the number a real buyer will actually offer is…
"It's not going to be a cost to you," President Trump told supporters in September 2024, promoting his tariff plan. "It's going to be a cost to another country." Every major independent study of the actual data published since then, from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the Peterson Institute for International Economics…
Every founder who has ever pitched an idea has heard the same romantic version of the American Dream: start with nothing, build something the world has never seen, and let the risk be the price of the reward. A quieter, less mythologized version of that same dream is sitting on the balance sheets of millions…
Ask most Americans who owns the nation's farmland, and the answer they expect involves China. The actual data tells a considerably different, and in some ways more unsettling, story: foreign nations, adversarial or otherwise, own a genuinely small sliver of American agricultural land, while a much larger and faster-growing share is quietly being absorbed by…
Americans' trust in newspapers, television, and radio to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly just hit a new all-time low of 28 percent. Meanwhile, a growing share of the country, more than a third of adults under 30, now regularly gets its news from independent podcasters, YouTubers, and online commentators instead. The obvious question…
On July 4, 2026, the United States marked 250 years since fifty-six men in Philadelphia pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to a proposition most of the world considered reckless: that free people could govern themselves. A quarter of a millennium later, the honest question is not whether the founders would be proud. It…
The Constitution Test Most Americans Would Fail
Ten questions most Americans have a strong opinion about, and get wrong more often than not. Read each question, commit to an answer in your head before scrolling to the explanation, and count up your score at the end. No trick questions here, just the plain text of…
