Dad Saves America

France is still on fire. A town hall nearly 200 years old has burned to the ground, and police are now drawing the line at the Louvre. Back home, the Cornell 7 case has become a Rorschach test for what’s left of feminism. This week, I’m responding to your comments on both.

From Paris to Cornell, the West has the same disease: a culture too permissive to judge anything, institutions no one can trust, and a generation raised without shame.

Does the West still have the backbone to say “No” to our spiritual decline?

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I sat down with comedian Bryan Callen, who directed and stars in our new comedy pilot, “The Experts,” to discuss why outrage pays better than nuance, how he found his way to God, and why boys need resistance to grow into men.

Watch “The Experts” pilot episode: https://youtu.be/dc1B5aKNmKw

We get into:

* What it was like directing for the first time

* The ruthless capitalism of Hollywood

* What happens to masculinity when drones replace warriors

* Why having all the facts on our phones doesn’t help us...

The Cornell 7 case has reignited the campus sexual assault panic of the mid-2010s. Jane Doe's own written statements described the events as consensual, but her story later transformed into a serious criminal allegation.

Unlike the Duke lacrosse hoax, which turned out to be an outright fabrication, this case is more ambiguous in both the accusations made and the culture they emerged from. Even so, the public outcry pulls on the same debunked statistics about campus sexual assault that turned colleges into Title IX kangaroo courts in the first place.

Rather than a salacious true...

I sat down with Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the “The Counterrevolution”. Victor is a Stanford PhD who still lives on his family’s Central Valley farm that five generations of Hansons have called home, giving him a rare view of both the academic elite and the working Americans they look down on.

We get into:

* Trump’s counterrevolution against 50 years of progressive rule

* Why America still dominates the world economy

* The 2016 dinner where Peter Thiel predicted Trump’s win

* Why the fall of Ir...

For the past three weeks, riots have spread across France. The corporate press is calling them mostly peaceful protests over school funding. Meanwhile, student rioters are singing jihadi rap.

Second and third generation Muslim immigrants are radicalizing against the very country that raised them. At the same time, 800,000 French Catholics gathered in Paris for Pope Leo’s recent visit. Two Frances are fighting over the same country.

A West that has forgotten its Christian roots no longer knows how to love its neighbor without surrendering to him. If Christians won't defend the civilization their faith bu...

I sat down with Shelby Steele, an author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and his son Eli Steele, the filmmaker behind “What Killed Michael Brown?” Together, they’ve produced a new documentary, “White Guilt,” that brings Shelby’s 2006 book into the present political climate. Shelby has lived the whole story, from segregation to Black Power militancy to now decades as a fearless dissenter on race.

We get into:

* What white guilt really is, and why it became a source of black power

* How the left used collective guilt to claim moral innocence

On Tuesday, the CEOs of Nvidia, Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, and more joined President Trump to discuss the development of AI, or, as the President has rebranded it, Super Intelligence. While they’ve signed a voluntary pledge to police AI safety, Democrats want Washington to step in instead, as if government standards do anything other than destroy innovation.

Americans invented this technology, but we're among the most pessimistic people on Earth about it. Only 36% of Americans expect AI to mostly help the country, compared to 93% in China. Trump is backing data centers anyway, just weeks before the mi...

I sat down with Andrew Hartz, a practicing clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute. His organization is working to filter out the political bias that has become endemic in mental health care and connect patients with therapists they can trust.

We get into:

* The woke insanity inside the American Psychological Association

* How to find a therapist who will actually help you

* Why disability benefits prove the role of agency in mental health

* What the Lindsay Clancy case revealed about the legal system

* Mass...

1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sent her daughter to a dysfunctional public school as a political statement, and is now paying the price. For years, socialists like Hasan Piker have flirted with banning private schools altogether under the theory that enrolling rich kids in failing schools can magically fix them. Universal public schooling, once a safety net for those who couldn’t afford a private school, has transformed into educational prison.

None of this is unique to education. In Canada, “universal” healthcare has become a death-panel hellscape, with sick patients being offered assisted suicide as if it were a legi...

I sat down with Ben Slivka, an early Microsoft executive who led the team that built Internet Explorer, served 20 years on Northwestern University’s Board of Trustees, and has spent decades since as an angel investor across biotech, space, and software startups.

We get into:

* How cowardice became the norm in university leadership

* Why the public school model fails so many students

* His 1995 Microsoft memo that correctly predicted the internet revolution

* The truth about the Microsoft antitrust case and why “monopoly” is a misleading term

* Why he believ...

AI researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic last week and became a whistleblower, warning that the race toward superintelligent AI is "gambling with our lives." Another Anthropic employee, Evan Hubinger, backed him up, putting the odds of AI apocalypse within a decade at over 10%. Then, Anthropic published a 154-page AI safety report on all sorts of alarming ways the technology is evolving.

Anthropic was founded as an AI-safety-conscious competitor to OpenAI. It’s company culture is heavily influenced by effective altruism, a utilitarian philosophy that attempts to optimize the wellbeing of the entire planet and ev...

I sat down with historian of early Christianity Matthew Larsen, Ph.D., fresh off his shoot in the Middle East tracing the life of Paul the Apostle, to dig into the evidence for Jesus, the biblical canon, and the Catholic Church.

We get into:

* How historians actually know what’s true about the ancient past

* Why the “Jesus never existed” theory keeps resurfacing online

* Where Wes Huff’s viral apologetics differ from real historical scholarship

* Why the idea that “Paul invented Christianity” is a 19th century German myth

* How the...

Zohran Mamdani just appointed Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer who once represented an Al Qaeda member, as New York City's chief legal counsel. This sparked outrage from 9/11 families and a petition demanding that he not attend this year’s 9/11 memorial collected more than 100,000 signatures.

A hundred million Americans have been born since 9/11, and campus interviews reveal that many were never taught who attacked us or why. Osama Bin Laden's “Letter to America” went viral on TikTok a couple years ago as if it were a revelation rather than propaganda.

Twenty five years after 9/11, some have forgotten the fi...

I sat down with investigative journalist and author Richard Miniter to reflect on the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Richard has spent decades reporting national security and foreign policy issues and has interviewed Islamist radicals, intelligence officials, and others across the globe.

We get into:

* Why political radicalism and terrorism attract elites

* How Western life radicalized Mohamed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

* Osama Bin Laden’s trajectory from construction tycoon heir to jihadist

* How terror cells use hazing intermarriage to lock in commitment

* The problem wi...

The bond market wobbled this week, and Secretary Bessent is now buying back government debt just to keep long-term interest rates from climbing further. Bond market volatility in the early fall has a bad history of signaling worse to come, from 1929 to 1987 to 2008.

The national debt sets a new all time high every day, recently crossing the $40 trillion mark. The U.S. dollar's status as the world's reserve currency has allowed us to kick the can down the road for decades, but interest payments on the national debt are reaching unsustainable levels and now the bond market...

I sat down with Katy Faust, founder of Them Before Us and author of “Raising Conservative Kids in a Woke City,” to talk about what adults are and aren’t willing to sacrifice for the wellbeing of children. Katy has spent her career defending children’s rights to their own mother and father, touching on adoption, gay marriage, surrogacy, and IVF. We also get into how she raised kids who think for themselves even while attending Seattle public schools and her personal experience with the adoption system.

We get into:

* Why children are safer with their ow...

The Lindsay Clancy trial has exploded into the latest social media gender war over postpartum mental health, the role of mothers in society, and the nature of moral responsibility. The defense says postpartum psychosis is to blame and that she shouldn’t be held criminally responsible in the deaths of her three children. Now the jury is deciding whether they buy her story.

Videos of women excusing Clancy’s actions or promoting conspiracy theories implicating her ex-husband have spread like wildfire on TikTok. Hundreds of women showed up to her trial wearing pink in solidarity and her fami...

I sat down with theoretical physicist Dr. Steven Koonin, author of “Unsettled” and former Under Secretary of Energy for Science under President Obama, to discuss what he calls the “consensus trap.” He argues that the 2008 financial crisis, COVID policies, and climate alarmism all followed the same template, and the people who got it wrong faced no accountability while the costs fell on the poor. Institutions built policy on flawed models, manufactured an elite consensus, and punished the scientists who dissented.

We get into:

* Why Fauci saying “I represent science” was a betrayal of science

* How the...

Last week, Cambridge’s youngest ever black full professor was found dead, days after resigning under investigation for plagiarism and his fabricated life story. Jason Arday claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, couldn't speak until age 11, and still earned a PhD by 30. When the scrutiny finally caught up with him, Amnesty International's response was to call for censorship.

Meanwhile, MIT's black enrollment dropped from 13% to just 5% after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action. Racial preferences in admissions have not achieved the supposed goal of closing educational disparities between black and white Americans, but inst...

I sat down with Os Guinness, author of “Our Civilizational Moment,” to discuss how the West has become a “cut flower” civilization. Os argues that the slow secularization of the West has left its freedom, virtue, and sense of meaning disconnected from the foundation that sustained them for centuries.

We get into:

* Growing up in China during WWII and the rise of Mao

* Why the West is a “cut flower civilization”

* The golden triangle of freedom, virtue, and faith

* Why atheism conflicts with free will

* Whether Islam can adapt to...

Thank you to all 500K+ subscribers to Dad Saves America!

This show began in response to the mental health crisis I saw emerging among my son’s peers. Then COVID lockdowns hit and turned my worst-case predictions into reality. Now, socialism is sweeping the Democratic Party and young women are marching in support of Hamas, all while social media continues to poison the minds of our kids.

As I like to say, the 1990s were the peak of Western civilization. The Cold War had been won, the economy was relatively stable, and our politics didn’t fe...

I sat down with Katharine Birbalsingh, headmistress of Michaela Community School and the UK’s most outspoken voice on education, to mark the launch of our new YouTube collaboration, Strictly Education. Katharine runs one of the strictest schools in the UK, for mostly disadvantaged students from immigrant families, and gets some of the best results in the country. Her solution to the failure of modern schooling isn’t about funding, racial politics, or experimenting with radical teaching methods. It’s discipline, structure, and a return to the values our grandparents understood instinctively.

We get into:

* Why sh...

Socialist Abdul El-Sayed just won Michigan's Democratic Senate primary, but the exit polls tell the real story. He dominated in college towns and lost badly in the working class neighborhoods he claims to represent. The same pattern played out in Zohran Mamdani's election.

The socialists calling themselves the voice of the working class have never done a day of physical labor in their lives. The working class knows it, and they're not buying it. So who's this “working class” movement actually for?

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Check my sources over on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/dads...

I sat down with Nick Freitas, veteran, fellow podcaster, and author of “The Manbook,” to talk about what it actually means to be a man in the aftermath of the woke revolution. In recent years, manosphere figures like Andrew Tate have arisen as an answer for young men who feel cast out at school, at work, and in mainstream culture. Their message takes legitimate grievances and points them in unhealthy directions. Nick advocates for a different answer: biblical masculinity.

We get into:

* What masculinity is really all about

* The moment Nick’s co-host change...

Rand Paul just released Dr. Anthony Fauci's personal diary, more than 1,100 pages stored on government servers, and then made him answer for it before the Senate. Fauci’s response to almost every question was the same. He pleaded the Fifth, over and over again.

But the real story isn’t the diary. It’s what Fauci represents. From funding offshore gain-of-function research, to soliciting cash prizes using federal resources, to the preemptive pardon shielding him from all of it, this is a portrait of an expert class that plays by it’s own rules and doesn’t think you...

I sat down with political scientist Kevin Wallsten to discuss his project building a new college ranking system from scratch. The standard metrics of acceptance rate, endowment size, and name recognition fail to address rising concerns about ideological bias and campus culture. With activism replacing the pursuit of truth throughout higher education, here’s what parents should know before sending their kids off to college.

We get into:

* Why University of Florida ranks #1 and Harvard lands at #37

* What the 68 variables in this new ranking system actually measure

* Why US News & World Re...

Christopher Nolan's “The Odyssey” opened last weekend and sent Homer's 2,800-year-old poem back up the bestseller charts. It also became the most fought-over movie in recent memory, with accusations of woke casting and the "1619 Project” treatment of the Western canon.

I decided to see the movie opening weekend. Some of the criticism lands. Some of it falls apart the moment the film starts. The real question isn't only whether the movie stays faithful to Homer, but which version of the West we think we're fighting for.

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Ready to give MASA a try? Get 25% off yo...

I sat down with bestselling author Eric Metaxas to discuss the Christian roots of America and what happens to our freedom if we forget them. His new book, “Revolution,” tells the story of the founding and the values that make America exceptional.

We get into:

* How the founders’ religious beliefs shaped the Revolution

* The paradox of freedom and faith

* Why the French Revolution ended in a bloodbath and ours didn’t

* The true role of slavery in the Declaration of Independence

* Why British elites despised the American colonist...

New York just became the first state to halt new AI data center construction. Bernie Sanders and AOC want to take that policy national, and 63% of Americans agree with them across party lines. This has become the one truly bipartisan issue in our politics, but bipartisan doesn't mean good.

The concerns range from energy costs to water use to noise pollution. Some concerns are legitimate, some have already been solved, and others are simply based on false information. For better or for worse, technological revolutions usually aren't reversible.

So what will the future of the...

I sat down with economic historian Phil Magness to give Karl Marx the fairest hearing we could, and then find out how his ideas took over half the world and most of modern academia.

We get into:

* The historical context of Karl Marx’s writings

* Why surplus value theory made intuitive sense and why it’s wrong

* How the iPhone launch disproves Marx’s labor theory of value

* The unlikely story of how Lenin and the Bolsheviks took over Russia

* Stalin, Trotsky, and the “real communism was never tr...

Last week, Zohran Mamdani “celebrated” this country’s 250th birthday by sitting behind George Washington’s desk and lecturing America about who we are. His own mother once said he isn't American at all, and never wanted to be. These days, most other countries have a higher opinion of the United States than Democrats.

Every immigrant who takes the citizenship oath swears to uphold values we’ve stopped taking seriously as a country. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court just upheld birthright citizenship, even for children born to parents with no allegiance to this country. Citizenship was once understood to be a re...

I sat down with Phil Magness, economic historian and author of “The 1619 Project Myth,” to discuss how the New York Times rewrote the founding narrative of the United States, first in print but eventually in schools nationwide.

We get into:

* How Phil caught a fabricated claim about Excel and plantations

* How the “new historians of capitalism” rewrote economic history

* Why Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, disproves the 1619 narrative

* Why libertarians and marxists united against the 1619 Project

* How Phil caught the Times quietly deleting its own claims

* T...

Most Americans can quote a line or two of the Declaration of Independence, but almost no one has actually read the whole thing. Today I'm going line by line to unpack what Jefferson was actually arguing and why it matters even more now than it did in 1776.

A generation raised with little independence and everything on demand can’t fully understand the values woven into the Declaration and how they apply today. In 2026, it isn’t all that suprising that Gen Z is increasingly pro-socialism and anti-patriotism.

Our creed won't pass itself on. That's our job...

I sat down with historian James Hankins, who recently resigned from Harvard after 40 years, to discuss why academia abandoned Western civilization, the institutional mechanisms that silence dissent, and how we can embrace the Western roots of America in the 21st century.

We get into:

* Why he left Harvard and joined the Hamilton School in Florida

* How fear of student backlash silences even tenured professors

* What happened to Harvard’s commitment to Western civilization

* Why teaching “global history” misses the point of education

* The link between Christianity, liberalism, and ca...

The United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Today I'm going back to the original text of the Constitution to uncover what it actually says, and just as importantly, what it doesn't.

The Constitution never mentions health, education, or retirement. The president was never meant to wield this much power. The Senate was never supposed to be directly elected. And the First Amendment almost wasn't about free speech at all.

The Founding Fathers didn't trust pure democracy. After 250 years, it's pretty clear they were right.

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Check my sources over...

I sat down with Jack Henneman, host of the “History of the Americans” podcast, to discuss the early history of the American colonies, the weaponization of history for political purposes, and why judging the past by today’s standards corrupts our ability to understand it.

We get into:

* Why Jack launched a podcast to read American history from the very beginning

* How the New York Times weaponized the 1619 Project to reshape history education

* How Spain’s conquest of the New World set the stage for English colonization

* Why the Puritans...

The world comes to America for the World Cup and falls in love. Europeans are singing our songs, losing their minds at Buc-ee's, and telling us we don't know how good we have it. Meanwhile, Rupert Lowe just released his 200-page report on the UK’s decades-long grooming gang disaster. The UK government now wants to ban social media for teenagers and arrest people for saying the wrong words online.

America is basking in global admiration. Britain is facing a civilizational reckoning. The question is whether we understand what makes the difference, and whether American fathers are wi...

I sat down with Tony Woodlief to discuss federalism, the collapse of left-right politics, and what it takes to raise kids through suffering.

We get into:

* Why federalism was the Founding Fathers’ most important contribution to governance

* Whether Mamdani’s New York will teach Americans the pitfalls of socialism

* The truth about political polarization and geographic sorting

* How federal agencies regulate your life without a single vote or legal basis

* Why we should shrink school districts back to the neighborhood level

* How revolution vs status quo...

Bari Weiss fires Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes and he compares it to losing a spouse. Karmelo Anthony's supporters call his conviction racist. Black YouTubers discover that the 1619 Project history taught in school is a lie.

The institutions we were told to trust have been exposed as propaganda operations. Online, people are waking up, but too many remain stuck in the legacy media echo chamber. When will the dam finally break?

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Check my sources over on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/dadsavesamerica/p/the-race-hustler-narrative-is-on?r=24ayxm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare...

I sat down with Georgetown University constitutional law professor and originalist scholar Randy Barnett to discuss his books on his time as a Chicago prosecutor, how the Supreme Court has reinterpreted the 14th Amendment, and whether Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions should be upheld by the Court.

We get into:

* How George Soros changed prosecution from a nonpartisan job into an ideological one

* The missing Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment

* Why the DEI framework contradicts the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause

* What libertarians have go...