Where Is America Going?

One vote in Congress, one number in a poll, and one question every free man should be asking himself.

I've been asking myself a question I never thought I'd have to ask. If America ever stopped being free — really free, the kind of free where a man can speak his mind, worship as he chooses, keep what he's earned, and stand equal before the law — where would I go to live out the rest of my life?

I've turned that question over more times than I'd like to admit, and here's what I keep coming back to: there is no answer. There is no backup America. There's no second country waiting over the horizon where liberty is the birthright and the government answers to the people. This is it. And the fact that a man who spent 35 years building a business in Hattiesburg, Mississippi — one bond, one handshake, one court appearance at a time — is even asking the question ought to tell you something about the moment we're in.

I'll be honest with you about something else, too. I'm having a hard time putting my finger on the ideas being promoted in this country right now. I suspect you are as well. These ideas don't announce themselves. Nobody stands at a podium and says, “I'm here to take what you've worked for.” It comes in pieces — a vote here, a poll there, a new political celebrity nobody had heard of two years ago. But when you lay the pieces side by side, a picture forms. Let me show you what I mean.

Exhibit A: July 15, 2026

On Wednesday, the U.S. House voted on an amendment by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky to strip $3.3 billion in security assistance to Israel from the annual State Department funding bill. The amendment failed, 104 to 314. That's the headline. The story is underneath it.

One hundred and three Democrats — a majority of those voting — voted to cut off aid to America’s closest ally in the Middle East. Ten more voted “present,” which is Washington’s way of ducking. Democratic leadership split in public, which almost never happens: Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted no, calling the measure “overly broad” — while telling his members he would not whip against it. His own second-in-command, Whip Katherine Clark, voted yes, declaring that “the status quo is not tenable.” And Nancy Pelosi — the former Speaker of the House, a self-described friend of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship — voted yes too, saying she supported the amendment “for the message that it sends.”

Stop and sit with that. Not long ago, a vote like this would have drawn a handful of supporters and been forgotten by supper. This week it drew a majority of House Democrats, split their leadership in front of the cameras, and got Nancy Pelosi’s blessing.

And it came home to Mississippi. Our delegation split the same way the country is splitting: Trent Kelly, Michael Guest, and Mike Ezell all voted no. Bennie Thompson voted yes. One of Mississippi’s four votes in the People’s House went toward cutting off an ally in wartime.

The Numbers Underneath the Vote

Politicians don’t move unless voters move first, and the voters have moved. A Pew Research Center survey in March found that 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now hold a negative view of Israel — up from 53 percent in 2022. A New York Times/Siena poll in May found just 24 percent of Democrats support additional aid to Israel, while 68 percent oppose it — as do 68 percent of independents. And for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2001, Americans as a whole no longer say their sympathies lie more with the Israelis.

I’ll make a concession here, because honesty demands it: this shift is not confined to college campuses or the far-left fringe. Older Democrats have moved. Independents have moved. Even Republican favorability toward Israel has slipped. Reasonable people can disagree about a foreign government’s conduct in a war, and some members who voted yes last week did so in good faith over humanitarian concerns. I don’t question their sincerity. I question where the current is carrying us — because a position that belonged to a half-dozen members a decade ago now commands a majority of one party’s caucus. That isn’t a disagreement. That’s a transformation.

The Ideas Underneath the Numbers

So what’s driving the transformation? Follow the ideas.

That same New York Times/Siena polling found 49 percent of Democrats aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of socialism — and 58 percent of those aged 30 to 44. Gallup found last fall that Democrats now view socialism more favorably than capitalism, 66 percent to 42. And a Cato Institute/YouGov survey found that among Americans aged 18 to 29, 62 percent view socialism favorably — and 34 percent view communism favorably.

Read that last number again. One in three young Americans holds a favorable view of communism. Not “generous social programs.” Communism — the ideology that starved Ukraine, emptied Cambodia, walled off Berlin, and put roughly a hundred million people in the ground in a single century. Their grandfathers stood watch against it. They think it polls well.

And it’s no longer just polling. New York City — the financial capital of the free world — is now governed by Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist. In last month’s New York primaries his movement flexed its muscle: a sitting congressman, Adriano Espaillat, was defeated by a progressive challenger, and a Mamdani-endorsed candidate, Aber Kawas, won a state senate nomination despite video of her attributing the 9/11 attacks to America’s “system of capitalism, racism, white supremacy and islamophobia”. Nearly three thousand of our neighbors were murdered that morning, and a major-party nominee in New York says the fault runs through us. She won her primary anyway.

Call it what you want — democratic socialism, progressivism, “economic justice.” I’ve stopped worrying about the label. I watch what the ideas do. And what these ideas do, everywhere they have ever been tried, is simple: they take. They take your earnings first, your property next, your speech after that, and your vote last — because a government big enough to give you everything you’re promised must be big enough to take everything you have. There has never been an exception. Not once. Not anywhere.

What I Believe

I believe in a handful of old ideas, and I make no apology for their age.

I believe freedom and safety are not enemies. I’ve spent 35 years in the surety bail profession proving that liberty and accountability can hold hands — that a free society doesn’t have to choose between the two, and shouldn’t trust anyone who says it does.

I believe in representation. The men and women we send to Washington work for us. When a majority of one party’s House members votes against the security interests of the United States and its allies, the people of this country are entitled to ask exactly who is being represented — and to answer that question at the ballot box.

And I believe that what a man builds belongs to him. My company wasn’t handed to me. It was built across three and a half decades of early mornings, late-night phone calls, and courtrooms in every corner of this state. The notion that government holds a moral claim to redistribute the fruit of that work — that a man’s life’s labor is a public resource awaiting a fairer allocation — is not compassion. It is confiscation with good manners.

The Founders understood this. Property and liberty were never two subjects to them; they were one subject. Take a man’s earnings at the government’s pleasure and you have made him a tenant in his own life. Every generation of Americans before us grasped that instinctively. Ours is the first that has to be talked back into it.

So — where is America going? I don’t know yet. I’m not sure anyone does. But I finally know the answer to my other question, the one about where I would move if freedom failed here.

Nowhere. I’m not going anywhere.

There is no country to flee to, because America is the destination, not the departure point. The people crossing oceans and deserts to get here understand that better than some of the people born here do. If freedom is going to survive anywhere, it has to survive here — and it will only survive if ordinary people, the business owners and veterans and parents and taxpayers who show up and do the work, decide it is worth defending with their voices and their votes.

I’m one of them. If you’ve read this far, I suspect you are too.

The question isn’t really where America is going. The question is whether we’re going to steer.