Month: June 2026

Colorado Democrats vote Tuesday in primaries that could hand Republicans their most useful campaign weapon of the 2026 midterms: proof that the socialist wave crashing through New York City was never just a New York problem.

Three weeks ago, the Democratic Socialists of America notched a trio of wins in New York City that sent establishment Democrats into a panic. Darializa Avila Chevalier knocked off Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in the 13th District on a platform that included shutting down prisons, eliminating ICE, erasing the southern border, and opposing the deportation of illegal immigrants regardless of criminal record. Claire Valdez took the 7th District running on citizenship and voting rights for people who entered the country illegally, taxpayer-funded transgender medical treatment, and the elimination of private health insurance. Brad Lander won in the 10th District by nearly 30 points, defeating Rep. Dan Goldman, one of the most prominent anti-Trump voices in the caucus and the man who led the push to impeach the president.

Colorado now gets to answer the question everyone in Washington has been asking since New York’s results came in: was that a fluke confined to one deep-blue city, or the opening act of something bigger? Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Diana DeGette, two of the biggest names in Colorado Democratic politics, both face primary challenges that party insiders are taking far more seriously than they expected to a month ago.

CNN’s Harry Enten warned Democrats about the implications last week after the New York primaries. “What is true in New York City in a Democratic primary ain’t necessarily true nationwide with the general electorate,” Enten said last week. The Democratic Socialists of America have a net favorable rating of +17 among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, according to Enten’s data, but are 27 points underwater with the electorate as a whole. That 44-point canyon between the party’s base and everyone else is precisely the gap Republicans intend to exploit. “Socialism has become increasingly popular among Democrats, but it is a much tougher sell in the rest of the electorate,” Enten said. Favorable views of socialism among Democrats climbed from 50% in 2010 to 66% today. Among everyone else, the number has barely moved, sitting at 30% now versus 29% sixteen years ago.

Polls show socialism is on the rise in the Democrat party but still highly unpopular amongst the overwhelmingly majority of Americans.

CNN: “Socialism has become increasingly popular among Democrats, but it is a much tougher sell in the rest of the electorate.” pic.twitter.com/2vysympwRW

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) June 25, 2026

Bennet abandoned his Senate seat to run for governor and now finds himself locked in a tighter-than-expected race against Attorney General Phil Weiser. A poll from the left-leaning firm PPP also showed Bennet trailing Weiser outside the margin of error, and two Democratic strategists familiar with the campaign said internal numbers track the same direction. “There may be only a slight Bennet advantage at this point,” said a Democratic strategist close to the race, granted anonymity to speak candidly, who described private polling as “all over the place.” Weiser, despite having eight years’ experience running the attorney general’s office, has somehow managed to cast himself as the outsider, branding Bennet a creature of Washington. Strategists say the message is sticking with primary voters who want nothing to do with anyone who smells like the establishment this cycle.

DeGette’s situation looks worse. After serving three decades in the House, she faces democratic socialist Melat Kiros. Internal polling has tightened to within the margin of error, and donors who dismissed the threat for weeks are suddenly paying attention. “It’s not looking great,” said one Colorado Democratic strategist familiar with DeGette’s numbers. “It’s very tough when you’re fighting against a wave.” DeGette rolled out a last-minute endorsement video from Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This move backfired with some progressives, given that Kiros already has Sen. Bernie Sanders in her corner.

Sen. John Hickenlooper is fending off his own challenge from state Sen. Julie Gonzales, with a private survey showing a dead heat in Denver even as a late-May public poll had Hickenlooper ahead 41% to 34% amid heavy undecideds. National DSA chapters have run phone banks for Kiros nearly daily, and Denver organizers expect close to 100,000 doors knocked by the time polls close.

“There’s a lot of anti-establishment momentum because voters are so angry,” Doug Friednash, a longtime Colorado Democratic strategist, said. “They want to take it out on someone. They want fighters.” Denver isn’t New York, and Democrats note that the city’s DSA infrastructure remains smaller, and that DeGette’s name recognition runs deeper than Espaillat’s ever did. But Denver has also grown younger and more restless, and that combination worries establishment Democrats.

Republicans are watching with open delight. “That’s what the left is putting out. It’s these radical leftists that are being elected. They’re being inspired by Mamdani, AOC, Bernie Sanders,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters told Newsmax, adding that the trend hands the GOP favorable matchups in competitive districts nationwide. “The people are going to reject this at the polls,” Gruters said, betting that a party drifting this far left has wandered clean off the map most American voters still occupy.

If Colorado follows New York’s lead, Democrats won’t just be arguing about ideology inside their own party, they’ll be handing Republicans a ready-made message for the 2026 midterms that the Democratic Party as a whole has become too radical for mainstream America.

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

Eric Schmidt hadn’t finished the word “artificial” before the booing started.

The former Google CEO stood at the University of Arizona’s commencement last month, ready to deliver the kind of speech he had probably given a dozen times before: AI as the next great transformation, graduates as its rightful authors.

He got as far as telling them the technology would “touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have.” The boos rose before he could finish his own sentence. “I can hear you,” he said gently. The boos continued, as did Schmidt, who was unable to fully conceal the awkward embarrassment.

He wasn’t the only one. A week earlier, at Middle Tennessee State University, Big Machine Records CEO Scott Borchetta told graduates that “AI is rewriting production as we sit here.” The boos from graduates started immediately. He responded with tough love: “I know it. Deal with it.” But the boos only grew louder.

A week before that, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield barely got through the phrase “next industrial revolution” at the University of Central Florida before the crowd erupted. “Okay, I struck a chord,” she said, turning around with her hands up in disbelief and clearly caught off guard.

They were all caught off guard. This isn’t how graduations usually go.

Older generations had their own frustrations with the people steering their world, but they rarely stood up at their own commencement, in front of their families, and told a stranger they didn’t believe them or what they had to say about their future.

It would be easy to read the response as simple nerves about a tough job market and leave it there. But when you look more closely at how this generation actually lives with technology, their worldview takes a different form.

A recent Gallup survey found that Gen Z’s use of AI has leveled off, but their feelings about it have not. Excitement has fallen 14 points in a year, to just 22 percent. And anger has climbed 9 points, to 31 percent. Even among those who use it every day, enthusiasm dropped by 18 points over 12 months. Eight in ten now believe AI will make learning harder. Forty-two percent believe it will hurt their ability to think carefully. Only a quarter believe it will help. Nearly half say the risks of AI in the workplace now outweigh the benefits, which is a sharp rise from the year before. And when asked whose work they actually trust, 69 percent said human work. Only 3 percent said AI’s work alone.

A separate Gallup study found that 47 percent of college students have seriously considered changing their major because of what AI is doing to the job market. Sixteen percent have already changed. The students who use AI most, such as in technology, business, and engineering, are also the ones most likely to be reconsidering whether they picked the right field at all.

The kids know the use of artificial intelligence is built into every device they touch throughout their day. It is being wired to replace the skills they were once told to seek in every career they had been advised to pursue.

They know it is being promised to make their lives “better” and “easier,” while they feel it is chipping away at their cognitive abilities and sense of challenge and fulfillment, and the adults in the room – or those being offered as role models on commencement stages – are wondering why youth aren’t as excited about AI as they expected.

And we should have seen this coming. According to researchers, Gen Z is the first generation in modern memory to test less cognitively capable than their own parents did at the same age, despite having more schooling and more access to information than any generation in human history.

In January, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee that attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, reasoning, general IQ – key cognitive performance indicators among young people – have stalled or reversed across much of the developed world over the past two decades. He points to classroom screens and education technology as the cause, arguing the brain was never built to learn the way these tools teach. More tools. More data. Less mind.

For nearly two centuries, every generation had tested smarter than the one before it. Researchers called it the Flynn effect, and it held through wars, depressions, and the collapse of empires. It was a 200-year winning streak. Horvath told lawmakers the streak is over.

The graduates booing those speakers are not confused about this. They are living it. They are the data.

A year ago, I wrote about a different version of this same generational response. Vinyl records were outselling CDs, mostly bought by people under 35. Journaling by hand, crochet, taking silent walks, and a trend called “Posting Zero,” in which young people stepped back from performing their lives online. That calm rebellion looked like withdrawal, but it has given way to something louder and bolder. It is a signal that we older folk need to pay attention to.

Older generations tend to see AI the way we see most new technology: as a tool that does or doesn’t work, that we adopt or resist on our own terms, in our own time. Younger generations don’t have that luxury of distance, and there is a fury at being told how to feel about it by people who built it, sold it, or profited from it first without understanding the consequences of using their youth as part of a larger experiment.

This next generation may not hit all the test scores that their forbears did, but they still have human wisdom intact. Children don’t get a vote on the experiments run on their own development, and yet these graduates found a way to cast their vote loudly. Either way, I hope their votes will be counted.

Kay Rubacek is an award-winning educator, filmmaker, author, and mother. Detained in a Chinese prison in 2001 for her human-rights advocacy, she has since dedicated her work to exposing the systems and ideologies that diminish human life and human sovereignty. She has been a contributor to The Epoch Times since 2010.

Authored by Nick Giambruno via International Man,

It is important to clarify something here.

While mainstream economists, the financial media, academia, and other gatekeepers of the rotten fiat currency system howl about the dangers of deflation, it is worth taking a moment to consider whether it is really such a bad thing.

First, it is important to define our terms.

The correct and true meaning of inflation is an increase in the money supply. So the correct and true meaning of deflation is a decrease in the money supply. But that is not what most people mean when they refer to deflation, because the money supply rarely contracts in a fiat monetary system. When most people say deflation, they mean a general fall in prices.

One of the biggest popular misconceptions in economics is that a general fall in prices is a “bad thing.”

It is an enormous misnomer. Falling prices caused by increases in productivity are actually a good thing. Who does not want to see their money go farther?

Technology is naturally deflationary. It drives down costs, increases efficiency, and makes goods and services cheaper over time.

In an honest monetary system, that would mean falling prices and rising purchasing power. In other words, your money would buy more as technology advances.

But that is not how the current system is designed to work. In fact, it does the opposite. It is like running on a treadmill that keeps accelerating.

In a fiat currency system, deflationary increases in productivity are more than offset by inflation, which benefits people who own stocks, houses, and other assets that rise with inflation, and hurts those who depend on wages denominated in the debased currency.

In short, in a fiat currency system, the benefits of deflationary technology primarily accrue to asset holders, because the forced inflation created by central banks pumps up asset values.

If we were living under an honest, hard-money monetary system, where the benefits of technology would not be offset by central banks debasing the currency, those gains would accrue more evenly across the population.

That is why I think the chart below is instructive.

It is a long-term view of real wages versus productivity.

The two tracked together well for decades, showing that as productivity increased, real wages did too. In other words, most people benefited from increases in productivity through higher real wages.

Then something changed around 1971, when that strong positive correlation broke. It was the year the US government cut the dollar’s last link to gold and the dollar became a pure fiat currency.

Since 1971, there has been a growing gap between productivity and real wages.

If you could transport yourself back to the early 1970s, just as the divergence between productivity and real wages began, and ask people what they thought 2026 would look like, they might have said something like The Jetsons – flying cars, advanced technology, and a society in which everyone was better off.

They probably would not have believed you if you told them that, in reality, people would be worse off in many ways in 2026 than they were in the early 1970s, despite enormous technological progress. We may not have flying cars or The Jetsons, but there have still been significant advances. Yet people’s standard of living has declined in many ways.

Today, many people are bewildered by how people could be worse off now than they were then. The answer is in this chart, which shows that the fiat system and currency debasement are the problem.

Despite advances in technology, the shocking level of currency debasement has not merely kept pace with the natural deflation that comes from increased productivity, but has vastly outpaced it… which is why people are, in many ways, worse off today than they were in the early 1970s. That prosperity has been stolen by inflation and fiat currency.

Since 1971, productivity has continued to increase, largely thanks to advances in technology, but those gains have not translated into growth in real wages as they had in the past under an honest money system. That is because under a fiat currency system, the central bank – the Federal Reserve – has created significantly more inflation than the gains in productivity, which meant real wages did not keep up.

However, those productivity gains from advancing technology did not just disappear. They were redirected somewhere else. They accrued primarily to asset holders, as wage earners chased rapidly depreciating fiat currency.

In short, the fiat currency system is a mechanism for transferring wealth created by technological productivity gains to asset holders and politically connected insiders closest to the money printer.

Frankly, it is a disgusting, dishonest system that operates at the expense of honest people.

But that is the nature of the monetary system we are all forced to live under. And it is wise to acknowledge it, understand it, and take action to protect yourself.

And now, with AI bringing a mind-bending level of productivity gains, this dynamic is about to go into overdrive.

I suspect we will see the gap in the chart above explode even further as AI, and future breakthrough technologies, produce the biggest productivity gains in human history, even as the US government is forced to create the largest amount of inflation in history to try to keep the debt-ridden fiat system going in the face of this historic disruption.

In other words, as technology becomes exponentially more deflationary and debt grows exponentially larger, the central bank’s response will have to become exponentially more aggressive.

That means more debasement of your purchasing power to fight the very force that should be making your life cheaper.

Clearly, you want to be an asset owner in this environment so you can protect yourself from currency debasement and also benefit from tech-driven productivity gains.

But what assets should you own? I will get to that soon.

If we lived under an honest monetary system anchored in hard-to-produce money like gold, I think there would be far fewer worries about AI automation and disruption. That is because we would not live under a debt-ridden fiat system in which the government is forced to debase the currency. That would mean increases in productivity from technology would benefit far more people, as their money would go farther, prices would generally fall, and the cost of living would decline. And the government would not try to offset that with inflation.

In such a world, I do not think AI would be nearly as controversial, because it would be seen as making the average person wealthier by reducing the cost of living.

So technological deflation that increases productivity and lowers prices is most certainly not a bad thing, as the fiat economists would have you believe. It is a wonderful thing and should create more abundance and make most people wealthier… in an honest monetary system.

That is why the whole framing around this issue needs to be challenged. It is not technology that is the problem. It is the fiat currency and the highly leveraged system that is the problem.

It is also why you see charlatans promote things like universal basic income (UBI) as a solution to the supposed AI problem.

The solution to the non-problem of technological increases in productivity is most certainly not a UBI, but rather an honest hard-money monetary system in which everyone generally benefits from increases in productivity – not just asset holders and politically connected insiders closest to the money printer.

Throwing the plebs a few crumbs with a UBI to help prop up a failing debt-based fiat currency scam is not a real solution. But thankfully, there is a real solution.

It starts with understanding the monetary, economic, and political forces driving this crisis – and taking practical steps before the next major wave of instability hits.

The fiat system is already under enormous pressure from sky-high debt, endless money printing, and accelerating technological disruption. The people who understand what is happening will be in a far better position than those who are blindsided by it.

That is why I put together a free special report focused on practical solutions – the top three strategies to help protect your money, preserve your freedom, and prepare for what comes next.