From Our Generation

Crom Carmichael and Mike Hassell
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From Our Generation is all about making sense of history, economics, and politics through real conversations. We dive into the ideas and events that shaped the world, how they still affect us today, and what they mean for the future. No lectures, just honest discussions about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

  1. 2d ago

    FAUCI FLOPS

    Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions about his conduct during COVID. The irony is difficult to overstate. While he had power, he suppressed free speech, shut down churches, banned public assembly, and pressured media to silence dissenting voices. Every right protected by the First Amendment was violated under his direction. When called to account, he used the Fifth Amendment to protect himself. The Constitution that shielded millions of Americans from exactly this kind of government overreach became his personal defense while offering nothing to the people he harmed. His diary, kept on a government computer for a planned memoir, revealed what he said publicly and what he believed privately were often different things. He acknowledged the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in private while dismissing it in public. He wrote about dining with Jake Tapper and his wife during the same period he told Americans not to gather for Thanksgiving. He noted meeting Kim Kardashian and becoming the most recognized person in the United States. The celebrity mattered more to him than the crisis he was supposed to manage. Every Democrat on the committee used their time to praise his 50 years of public service. Not one asked a question about the evidence. The pattern is consistent: as long as a bureaucrat expands government power, the party of government will protect them regardless of the damage done. The Federal Register, the book containing all federal regulations, was under a thousand pages in 1974. Under Obama it exceeded 100,000. Trump brought it to 70,000 in his first term. Biden pushed it back over 106,000. Trump has it under 70,000 again. The growth of bureaucratic power is measurable, and its reduction is the reason Trump is despised by the institutional left in a way no other Republican has been. Government grocery stores are coming to New York. Mamdani announced city-owned stores will sell staple items at 30% below market price. A well-run grocery store makes 3% profit. Selling at 30% below market means losing 27% on every transaction before accounting for the operational incompetence that government enterprises reliably deliver. Chicago already ran this experiment. Walmart closed five stores on the south and west sides after the city refused to address shoplifting. The replacement, Save A Lot, received $26 million in subsidies, burned through half of it in two years, and closed all seven locations on the same weekend. Each store lost roughly a million dollars a year just trying to operate at market prices. Mamdani is taking that failed model and adding a 30% discount. The midterm bellwethers remain Maine, Michigan, and Wisconsin. If swing states elect DSA-aligned candidates over moderates and well-known Republicans, that is not a polling fluctuation. It is a structural shift in what American voters are willing to accept. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  2. 4d ago

    SOCIALIST FAILS

    The word visionary gets applied to people who have not earned it. A visionary, in any meaningful sense, is someone whose ideas produce a better future. Someone whose ideas have already been tested and failed is not a visionary. They are repeating a mistake. Every major policy position of the Democratic Socialists of America, abolishing police, eliminating prisons, opening borders, government ownership of major corporations, has been tried in other countries. The outcomes are not ambiguous. They produced poverty, authoritarianism, and collapse. Calling those ideas visionary is not generosity. It is illiteracy. The bellwether races are narrowing. Maine's Senate race pits Susan Collins, one of the few genuinely moderate politicians in America, against a socialist replacement candidate. Michigan's Senate primary features a DSA-backed candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders and AOC who openly calls for dismantling the system. Wisconsin's governor primary produced a suspicious result in Milwaukee: the hard-left candidate lost under circumstances that suggest party intervention to install a more electable moderate. If she is later appointed to a high-level administrative position, the evidence of a managed outcome becomes difficult to dismiss. Texas now matters as an indicator. If Talarico, a far-left state rep running for Cornyn's vacated Senate seat, wins against Ken Paxton in a state that is not considered a swing state, that result would signal a shift deeper than anything in Maine or Michigan. The constitutional architecture is under direct threat. If Democrats win the presidency, House, and Senate with sufficient margin, the sequence is predictable: eliminate the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, add Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, then pass a statute eliminating the Electoral College. A packed court operating under a "living Constitution" doctrine could affirm that statute without requiring an amendment. Twenty years ago, both parties accepted that the Constitution could only be changed through the amendment process. That consensus no longer exists. The phrase "our democracy" is doing specific work. The United States is not a democracy. It is a constitutional republic. The founders were deeply suspicious of pure democracy because it concentrates power in the majority and destroys individual rights. Every structural feature of the government they designed exists to prevent that outcome. When politicians invoke "our democracy" to justify changing constitutional rules by statute, they are using a term that sounds inclusive to mean something that eliminates the constraints the founders built to protect the individual. AOC claims no one can earn a billion dollars without harming others. The claim rests entirely on Marx's labor theory of value. Sam Walton started with one store and built a company that lowered prices for tens of millions of Americans in communities that previously had no access to affordable goods. His children inherited over $150 billion. No one has asked AOC how she would have stopped Walton from opening more stores, or what happens to innovation when the reward for success is capped at 100% taxation above an arbitrary threshold. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  3. Aug 24

    THE SOVIET PLAYBOOK

    Democratic Socialists are winning primaries in deep blue districts and now testing whether their platform can survive swing-state voters. Three bellwether races will answer the question. In Maine, Susan Collins faces a socialist replacement candidate after Graham Platner's exit. Collins is one of the few genuinely moderate politicians in America, reelected three times in a purple state. In Michigan, a DSA-backed Senate candidate endorsed by Bernie Sanders and AOC openly calls for tearing down the system. In Wisconsin, a hard-left candidate leads the Democratic gubernatorial primary against an establishment opponent so weak the party is trying to recruit a previously expelled candidate back into the race, despite his history of virulently anti-gay social media posts they themselves deemed disqualifying months earlier. The DSA platform reads like a condensed version of the 1936 Soviet Constitution. Article 4 of that document established socialist ownership of the means of production as the economic foundation of the state. The DSA says the government should own the largest corporations. The S&P 500 is worth roughly $60 trillion. 62 million Americans personally own shares. Pension funds, 401(k)s, and IRAs hold trillions more. Government seizure of those companies would send every share to zero. No interviewer has asked a DSA candidate what happens to the 150 million Americans whose retirement savings vanish overnight. Marx's labor theory of value, the idea that only physical work creates worth, is the foundation of every socialist economic argument. AOC says nobody earns a billion dollars. The claim only holds if you define value as hours worked. It collapses the moment you account for invention, innovation, and the creation of products that millions of people voluntarily choose to buy. Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars. His companies are worth seven to eight trillion. He created six to seven trillion dollars of wealth for other people: employees, investors, pension funds, and customers. Government-run enterprises cannot even cover their own expenses. The Post Office loses $10 billion a year. Amtrak has never broken even. Every municipal bus system in the country runs at a loss. The New York subway system loses money despite generating revenue. The structural reason is simple: government enterprises have no mechanism to control costs because their expense side is driven by politics, not competition. Nate Silver's research identifies the DSA's base: well-educated, poorly paid, concentrated in teaching, nonprofits, social work, and the public sector. All four categories are government-adjacent. The people who benefit most from expanding government are the ones advocating for it. The "Omni Cause" connects 16 categories of leftist activism into a single framework: Palestine, police abolition, open borders, climate, housing, gender, race, decolonization, and more. Each requires more government. The underlying premise is that society is a hierarchy of oppressor and oppressed, that neutrality is complicity, and that silence is support for the dominant group. Once that framing is accepted, every policy conclusion follows automatically. Britain's seventh prime minister in ten years took office with a speech blaming Margaret Thatcher's 1980s reforms for the country's problems. Those reforms were the last time British decline was actually reversed. The new PM's ideas were shot down within days by his own coalition. He is unlikely to last a year. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  4. Aug 13

    69 TRILLION DOLLARS

    The Democratic Socialists of America want to "take democracy beyond the ballot box." The phrase sounds like an expansion of fairness. It is the opposite. Democracy has a specific meaning: representation through elected government. Taking it "beyond" that means using state power to equalize outcomes in every domain of life, which requires a government large enough to seize and redistribute the resources of an entire economy. The DSA platform calls for the government to own the largest corporations. The S&P 500 alone is worth $69 trillion. 62% of Americans own equities. Transferring that wealth to government control would devastate every retirement account, pension plan, and 401(k) in the country. No interviewer has asked a single DSA candidate what happens to those retirees. The DSA platform also calls for abolishing the Senate and making the presidency and Supreme Court subordinate to the House. Free healthcare, free housing, free education through college, universal basic income, and a 32-hour workweek with no pay reduction. These are promises that cannot be kept because the math does not support them. Socialism does not fail because of poor execution. It fails because it eliminates the pricing signals that allow an economy to allocate resources. Without profit, loss, and competition, no system can self-correct. John Fetterman announced he will leave the Democratic Party if it votes against aid to Israel. Over 150 House Democrats have now coalesced around cutting all support. The schism is real, but it may not matter structurally because no major Democrat will criticize the DSA wing publicly. Hakeem Jeffries calls them part of the coalition. James Carville says he cannot be in a party with them but will not become a Republican. The energy and the money are with the socialist wing, and no one in party leadership is willing to confront it. Confucius, asked what he would do first if given leadership of a state, answered: rectify the language. The battle over terminology is not incidental. "Stolen land" acknowledgments now open nearly every left-leaning institutional event. The framing establishes that the existing order is illegitimate before any policy discussion begins. Reparations follow the same logic. Once the premise is accepted, the conclusion is predetermined. The strategy is to make people feel guilty about things they cannot control, then offer government expansion as the moral remedy. A Brown University professor allowed students to take a midterm at home. The class average jumped to 96, up from a historical range of 60 to 80. When the professor announced the final would be supervised in the classroom, 27 students dropped the course. 22 of those 27 had scored 100 on the midterm. The average score on the supervised final was 48. Brown has an honor code. Whether the university enforced it is an open question. An audit of the Minority Business Development Agency found that $15.4 billion of $16 billion in transactions were duplicate, undocumented, or should never have been approved. Not a single Democratic senator attended the Senate hearing on entitlement fraud. Fraud has become a business model for blue states drawing federal dollars with no verification attached. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  5. Jul 24

    SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS

    Graham Platner won the Maine Democratic primary with 72% of the vote. Twelve days later, his own party is pushing him out. The reason has nothing to do with the Nazi tattoo, the abuse allegations, or the sexting claims. All of that was known before the primary. What changed is that he fell behind Susan Collins in the polls. The same party that threw Joe Biden overboard after he won every single delegate is doing it again: invoking democracy as sacred while overriding it whenever the math stops working. Platner has paused his campaign but has not signed the withdrawal paperwork. The delay is almost certainly about money. A multimillion-dollar book deal, structured the same way Anita Hill's was, would explain why his signature hasn't appeared yet. The Declaration of Independence asserts three self-evident truths: that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Government exists to secure those rights, deriving its authority from the consent of the governed. Either those assertions are valid or they are not. If they are, then every policy that violates them will produce bad outcomes, not immediately, but inevitably. The U.S. public equity market is worth roughly $80 trillion. Russia's is $800 billion, about 1% of ours. Putin's personal net worth is estimated at $200 billion, roughly a quarter of Russia's entire equity market. That is what happens when a system allows rulers to acquire wealth through power rather than production. The pattern repeats in Uganda, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and across most of the developing world. It was, in fact, the default condition of human civilization until the American experiment changed it. 62% of Americans own equities. When socialists claim only the rich benefit from capitalism, the numbers say otherwise. The Supreme Court overturned a 91-year-old precedent and ruled that every executive branch employee ultimately reports to the president. The previous framework created effectively a fourth branch of government: agencies staffed by unelected regulators writing rules with the force of law, accountable to no voter. That framework is now dismantled. The birthright citizenship ruling, by contrast, may be the worst Supreme Court decision in terms of long-term impact. Hospitals in Texas are already advertising in Central and South America: deliver your baby here for $3,000 and your child is a U.S. citizen. The majority opinion ignored the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" without explanation. Trump has requested expedited review. The difference between a government and a business is simple. A business must take resources worth X and produce something worth more than X, or it ceases to exist. A government takes in 100% of what it collects, consumes 10 to 40% administering itself, and distributes the rest. It is inherently consumptive. The bigger it grows, the more it consumes, and the greater the burden on the productive sector that funds it. A Minority Business Development Agency audit found that $15.4 billion of $16 billion in transactions were duplicate, undocumented, or should never have been approved. California has a ballot measure for November: a one-time 5% tax on net worth above a billion dollars. One-time taxes never stay one-time. The threshold will drop. The exodus will accelerate. And the revenue will never arrive. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  6. Jul 20

    THE OLDEST QUESTION

    Barack Obama opened his Presidential Center with a speech that denigrated the Declaration of Independence and praised the Constitution in the vaguest possible terms. He skipped "endowed by our Creator," as he always does, and framed the Constitution as a document designed to "change with the times," a phrase that sounds reasonable until you realize he means judicial reinterpretation, not the amendment process the founders actually built. When Democrats invoke "our democracy," they mean something specific: the removal of constitutional constraints on what they want to do. The founders were deeply suspicious of democracy for exactly this reason. Every structural feature of the government they designed, the Senate, the Electoral College, the separation of powers, exists to prevent a majority from destroying the rights of the individual. Keir Starmer resigned as Britain's seventh prime minister in ten years, less than two years after winning a landslide. He promised to address immigration and increase defense spending for NATO. He did neither. British living standards have slipped to roughly half of American levels over a 50-year period, driven by a government that keeps growing while the productive economy it feeds off keeps shrinking. Sharia law is expanding in British culture. Rape victims who accuse Muslim perpetrators face more scrutiny than the accused. Political greatness, the kind that actually reverses decline, is extraordinarily rare because it requires standing against entrenched interests that are powerful, well-funded, and have no intention of yielding. Two-thirds of Democrats now view socialism favorably. Capitalism's favorable rating among Democrats has dropped to 42%. Democratic Socialists are winning primaries in New York, Seattle, and potentially Los Angeles. Their platform includes abolishing ICE, a 32-hour workweek with no pay reduction, universal basic income, federal rent control, free college, and halting all deportations. These are promises that cannot be kept because the math behind them does not work. Socialism does not fail because of bad implementation. It fails because it eliminates the pricing information that a competitive market uses to allocate resources. Without that information, no amount of good intention produces efficiency. New York City's mayor controls 200,000 public housing units that require $78 billion in repairs to become livable. He is doing nothing to fix them while proposing a tax to build 200,000 more. He is, by definition, the city's largest slumlord. Bernie Sanders wants the federal government to own 50% of AI companies, calling them a "public resource." If AI is a public resource, so is food, water, housing, media, and everything else. The argument has no limiting principle, which is the point. Social Security's trust funds will be exhausted by 2034. Benefits will automatically drop 22% unless Congress borrows more or raises taxes. A Republican amendment at the program's creation would have put half of contributions into individual investment accounts. Had that passed, every retiree today would be financially independent. California signed legislation raising health premiums by up to 97% and is now taxing software. Seventeen red states are suing over a California packaging law that effectively imposes regulatory costs on businesses across the country. The tension between command and freedom is not new. Dutch settlers on Manhattan in the 1600s were already demanding rights from the trading company that employed them, more than a century before the Constitution was written. The question of how much authority any single person or institution should hold over others is the oldest political question there is, and it has not been answered. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  7. Jul 10

    29% PATRIOT

    A CNN poll on July 4th attitudes reveals a divide that did not exist a generation ago. In January 2001, 85% of Democrats said they were extremely or very proud to be American. In 2026, that number is 29%. Republican pride held steady at 90% across the same period. Only 27% of Democrats plan to display the flag on July 4th, down from 65% twenty-five years ago. The question isn't which party is right. The question is what happened in a single generation to produce that kind of collapse. Part of the answer may be in the classrooms. At Harvard, 47% of seniors report experiencing mental illness during their time at the university, with another 13% unsure. Princeton's numbers are worse: over 60% sought mental health counseling or therapy during college. These are not struggling students. They were among the most capable people in the country when they arrived. Four years later, they are twice as likely to report mental illness as the general population. The demographics most associated with mental illness in the broader data: college-educated, Democrat, liberal, white, and lower family income. College-educated Americans are more depressed than those without degrees. Something is being taught, or absorbed, that is making intelligent people less functional. A self-described socialist internationalist professor at St. Anselm's College posted a public meltdown summarizing the state of the progressive project: Venezuela lost, Cuba slipping, climate action dead, the American left described as populist trash in possession of zero brainpower. The despair is real, but it is the despair of an ideology that assumed history would move in one direction and is watching it reverse. The Obama Presidential Center opened in Chicago at roughly $1 billion, more than triple its original budget, five years behind schedule. Obama gave a speech about how American culture is too fixated on money and fame. Meanwhile, the Association of Black Contractors in Chicago reports that minority firms Obama promised to use were stiffed. Some are declaring bankruptcy after completing hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid work. The celebrities performing at the grand opening were not working for free. A GAO report reveals there is no way to cross-reference federal spending records with the government's own "do not pay" list. Blue states are refusing to cooperate with federal efforts to identify fraudulent recipients. The fraud has become a business model: a mechanism for drawing federal dollars into state budgets with no accountability attached. The EU Parliament voted for the strictest immigration laws in 50 years, followed by floor chanting of "send them back." The EU also agreed to eliminate tariffs on all U.S. industrial goods, a concession that was supposed to be impossible under Trump's trade pressure. Illinois added $800 million in new annual taxes, its 63rd tax or fee increase under Pritzker. California state workers are suing to avoid returning to the office, arguing that commuting harms the environment. And Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX went public, while Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, neither of whom has ever created a job or shared a dollar of personal wealth, called him too rich. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

  8. Jul 1

    OLIGAHCHY

    Every dollar spent on government is a dollar somebody else had to earn. That math never changes, no matter how large the economy gets. On a ten-person island, adding one government worker forces the remaining nine to work 11% longer to cover the same output. Add a retiree and the burden climbs again. Scale that to a $7 trillion federal budget and the math is the same, just harder to see. Bernie Sanders now leads the Democratic Party by the only metric that matters: candidates seek his endorsement more than any other Democrat's. His position has not moved in 40 years. More government, single-payer healthcare, higher taxes, universal programs. He calls the healthcare system broken while having done more than any single politician to build the system he now criticizes. He points to Canada as a model, omitting that wealthy Canadians fly to the U.S. for surgery because wait times make their own system unusable for anything urgent. He calls Great Britain single-payer when it actually runs a two-tier system where anyone who can afford private care opts out of the government version. The word oligarch gets thrown around without definition. Sanders uses it to attack billionaires, but oligarchy is a political concept: power over others enforced by the state. Mark Zuckerberg cannot compel anyone to use Facebook. The CEO of Exxon cannot set the price of oil. A U.S. Senator can vote to force 330 million people to buy health insurance, destroy an industry, or restructure an economy. If oligarch means anything, it applies to the people who write the laws, not the people who build the products. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's. It exports oil and raw materials. It has never produced a globally competitive manufactured product, not a car, not an appliance, nothing. That is what happens when a system does not allow producers to become more efficient over time. The absence of property rights and competitive markets guarantees stagnation regardless of natural resources. Graham Platner is running for the Maine Senate seat against Susan Collins with a Nazi prison guard tattoo he wore for 18 years, sexting allegations from over a dozen women, six accusations of physical abuse, and a biography built on an oyster farm that sells primarily to his mother's restaurant. Democrats are standing behind him because they need 51 seats. The New York Times ran a hit piece, likely to pressure him out before the July 12 ballot deadline so the party can appoint a replacement who never ran a primary. In Alaska, Democrats recruited a man with the same name as the Republican incumbent to run as a fake Republican under ranked-choice voting. Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes after publicly confronting his new boss at an all-hands meeting, calling him unwelcome and unqualified. He framed it as a stand for journalistic integrity. The more likely story: his producer asked him to include information that would balance a story, he refused, and called the additional sourcing "unverified" because he never bothered to verify it. Rachel Maddow publicly invited him to MSNBC, which is the last thing a journalist claiming to be balanced wants to hear. For more episodes and resources, visit fromourgeneration.com. Dive deeper with Giants of Political Thought at giantsofpoliticalthought.com.

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About

From Our Generation is all about making sense of history, economics, and politics through real conversations. We dive into the ideas and events that shaped the world, how they still affect us today, and what they mean for the future. No lectures, just honest discussions about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Information

  • Creator
    Crom Carmichael and Mike Hassell
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    67
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Crom Carmichael and Mike Hassell
  • Show Website
    From Our Generation