How can we remain the same country and culture when we can’t agree on much of anything?

Not merely on policy preferences or the usual disputes of democratic life, but on the most fundamental things — the meaning of words, the interpretation of laws, the basic facts of what is happening around us.

The foundation has not merely cracked; in many quarters, it is being jackhammered from below.

Laws long passed and enforced are now subject to interpretations so tortured and remote from their original intent that the men who wrote them would not recognize their own handiwork.

Terms once universally understood are now redefined mid-conversation, or worse, intentionally misunderstood as a weapon — deployed to wrong-foot the honest and reward the disingenuous.

Language, which is the shared medium of a civilization, has become a minefield. You cannot debate someone who will not agree on what the words mean, any more than you can play chess with an opponent who moves the pieces when you aren’t looking.

The effect on ordinary people has been profound. Reasonable men and women — the kind who hold jobs, raise families, pay taxes, coach Little League, and generally ask only to be left in peace — are shopworn and threadbare from the relentless mental assault. And sometimes it is not merely mental.

The ambient pressure at this moment has a grinding, exhausting quality that is not accidental.

Two theologies of work built two different worlds. One tends what it inherits. The other consumes it and moves on. The qanats of Persia tell you which is which.

In the dry interior of Iran there are tunnels older than Rome. The qanat is an underground aqueduct, dug by hand, that taps the water table high in the hills and carries it by gravity across dozens of miles to fields that see almost no rain.

No pumps. No electricity. Some of them have been running for three thousand years, irrigating the same ground, kept alive by the same unglamorous labor in every generation: clearing the silt, holding the gradient, keeping the access shafts open. UNESCO lists the survivors as world heritage, because a working qanat is one of the most elegant pieces of engineering the ancient world produced.

Most of them are silted now. Dry. The fields above them have gone back to dust.

Nobody bombed the qanats. No colonial power filled them in. They failed the way every inherited thing fails when the people who inherit it stop doing….

I have written about this issue before, but with the midterms approaching, I thought it bears repeating. It’s so very, very important.

STOP saying liberal.

STOP saying woke.

STOP saying progressive, Socialist, or Marxist.

Those words don’t appear on any ballot.

Not anywhere, unless you live in Vermont and Bernie Sanders is running.

The word that appears on election ballots is DEMOCRAT.

We need to be perfectly clear. Those who are causing most all of America’s serious problems are DEMOCRATS.

The vast majority of our political crises and problems are caused by people who either identify as Democrats or vote Democrat.

Once something is branded — whether positive or negative — it sticks. Like Super Glue, that label is hard to shake. Whenever you speak, write, or post, identify our political opponents as DEMOCRATS.

That’s why we must BRAND the Democrat Party as anti-God, anti-America, violent, and the party of Big Government, elite socialists and Marxists: because they are. If we do not define them, they will define themselves, deceitfully.

Rockefeller built the world's greatest fortune not by drilling for oil but by turning crude into fuel. Standard Nuclear means to do likewise, with a fuel so advanced it can't even release radiation.

A single uranium pellet the size of a gummy bear contains as much energy as 140 barrels of oil. It’s the cleanest, safest energy source known to man.

No one who knows what they’re talking about disputes this.

So why don’t we have nuclear-powered everything?

In short: We buried a miracle in paperwork. Since the 1970s, building a new reactor has effectively been illegal in America. It required $30 billion and 15+ years in regulatory hell.

I bring good news. In my many travels, I’ve met the world’s best nuclear entrepreneurs (yes, that’s actually a real thing now). I’ve now known many of these guys for a while and have become friends with them. This was the first time they’ve ever said the following to me (and they all agreed):

“Regulation is finally becoming a solved problem.”

One founder said his microreactor (a small nuclear reactor, or “SMR”) could be up and running next year.

So let’s talk about the “problems” remaining with nuclear. What do we do with the waste? And how do we get fuel? We’ll meet the entrepreneurs coming to the rescue on both.

Last year, in the aftermath of Los Angeles’s devastating wildfires, California Governor Gavin Newsom promised to speed up “critical” wildfire-prevention projects.

Newsom issued an emergency proclamation to “cut bureaucratic red tape” and “fast-track critical projects,” including brush clearance, forest thinning, prescribed burning, and other forms of fuels reduction.

“These are the forest management projects we need to protect our communities most vulnerable to wildfire,” Newsom said last spring. “[W]e’re going to get them done.”

We filed a public records request to discover whether Newsom is keeping his word. As of last month, the Newsom administration had fast-tracked fuels-reduction work on roughly 87,000 acres of land. But internal records we obtained from state fire authorities indicate that state-approved organizations had completed projects totaling about 781 acres—less than 1 percent.

These numbers are disastrous. The governor’s office insisted that these projects, which are part of the state’s larger wildfire-prevention efforts, were “critical” and would help “protect communities from catastrophic wildfire.” The documents we obtained, which concern the fast-tracked projects, reveal that the Newsom administration has failed to protect the state.

What has put so much of California at risk to burn? In part, the state’s environmental rules.

In 1991, I had the unique opportunity to host three foreign exchange students from the United Arab Emirates at my home in South Florida.

It was a fascinating window into a culture fundamentally different from our own.

Having previously served as a Peace Corps Volunteer and Instructor of Biology at the University of Liberia (1972–1975), I was intensely curious about the social frameworks that shaped different civilizations.

In West Africa, the traditional system of dispute settlement known as the palaver bears a distant resemblance to a filibuster. Both sides talk, negotiate, and marshal support. The larger and more influential the factions involved, the more likely the matter ultimately rises to a chief or clan elder for resolution.

One evening, discovery came through a casual conversation. One of the students mentioned he had three mothers. Fascinated by the logistics of a polygamous household, I asked what it was like growing up with so many siblings and mothers under one roof.

His answer was strikingly direct.

“It is simple. There is strength in numbers.”

He explained that in the traditional world from which his culture emerged, the group with the greatest numbers usually prevailed in conflict. Maintaining a large family was not merely family planning. It was protection, influence, and survival.

At the time, I viewed his answer as a remarkable piece of sociological insight—a window into an ancient, clan-based worldview. Thirty-five years later, I have come to see it differently.

The German ambassador to Egypt works out of a house that used to belong to a Jewish family. So does the Swiss ambassador. So does the American one. The homes were confiscated in 1956, when the Egyptian government declared, in a proclamation read aloud from the minarets of Cairo and Alexandria, that all Jews were Zionists and enemies of the state.

The families were given one suitcase. They signed documents “donating” everything else to the government. Then they left. The houses are still there; the families are not.

This is where the argument about Israel begins — not in Europe, but here.

There is a story told about Israel with remarkable confidence in universities, at the United Nations, in the opinion sections of newspapers that should know better. The story goes like this: European Jews, traumatized by European persecution, arrived in a land populated by indigenous Arabs and established, by force, a settler state. European guilt. European migration. European power. Colonialism wearing a Star of David.

The story requires you to ignore the majority of Israelis.