Amendment Media | Randy Flagg

Here is a simple question that the United States government has not been able to answer for seventy years:

Is the gold still there?

Not a complicated question. Not a classified one. The gold in Fort Knox belongs to the American people, is listed as a public asset on the U.S. Treasury’s balance sheet, and has been cited for decades as a foundation of American economic credibility. All we are asking is whether it exists in the quantity the government claims, in the form the government claims, in the place the government says it is.

The government’s answer, for seventy years running, has been: trust us.

What We Actually Know

The last genuine audit of Fort Knox’s gold was conducted during the Eisenhower administration — 1953. That is not a typo. The last time anyone with independence, authority, and proper methodology confirmed that America’s gold reserves are intact was when Dwight Eisenhower was president, Joseph Stalin had just died, and the Korean War was still being fought.

In 1974, the government staged what it called an inspection. Journalists and members of Congress were brought to Fort Knox for an afternoon. They were shown some gold. They were not shown all of it — estimates suggest they viewed less than six percent of the total holdings. No independent metallurgical testing was conducted. No assaying. No third-party verification of the gold’s composition or purity. It was, as one account put it, a “peek-a-boo glance at the gold in fine Hollywood style.”

That 1974 visit is frequently cited as the last audit of Fort Knox. It was not an audit. It was a photo opportunity.

Since then, the Treasury Department conducts what it calls annual internal reviews. The operative word is internal. The government checks on the government’s gold and reports that the government’s gold is fine. This is the oversight equivalent of asking someone if they did their homework and accepting “yes” as sufficient verification.

The United States holds approximately 261.5 million troy ounces of gold — roughly 8,133 tons — stored primarily at Fort Knox, with additional holdings at the West Point Mint and the Denver Mint. At current market prices of approximately $4,481 per ounce, this represents roughly $1.17 trillion in assets.

The U.S. Treasury currently values this gold on its books at $42.22 per troy ounce — a statutory price that has not been updated since 1973. So the official book value of America’s gold reserves is approximately $11 billion. The market value is approximately $1.17 trillion. The difference between those two numbers — over $1.15 trillion — exists on no government balance sheet anywhere. It is the world’s largest accounting fiction, maintained by a government that has not independently verified the underlying asset in over seventy years.

This would be a remarkable situation for any publicly held company. For the sovereign treasury of the world’s largest economy, it is extraordinary.

The Part Where It Gets Interesting

In early 2025, two of the most powerful men in Washington decided they agreed with the people who had been asking about this for decades.

President Trump announced plans to audit Fort Knox. Elon Musk, then running DOGE with the stated mission of bringing transparency and accountability to the federal government, offered to livestream it. The internet briefly lost its mind. Audit Fort Knox trended. For about five minutes, it looked like the question that had been dismissed as a conspiracy theory for seventy years was about to get an answer.

Then Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent held a press availability. He said: “We do an audit every year. All the gold is present and accounted for.”

And that was it. Trump stopped talking about it. Musk stopped talking about it. The media moved on. The audit did not happen.

Let’s think about that sequence of events for a moment.

Two men who had just spent years — in Musk’s case, a career — arguing that government institutions cannot be trusted to self-report, that transparency is the only antidote to institutional corruption, and that the establishment always lies to protect itself, asked a perfectly reasonable question about a public asset. A government official told them not to worry about it. And they immediately stopped worrying about it.

There is no charitable interpretation of this that does not raise further questions.

The Bill That Went Nowhere

Representative Thomas Massie — the same congressman who co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act with Ro Khanna before being primaried out of office for his trouble — introduced the Gold Reserve Transparency Act of 2025 in June of that year. The bill called for an independent, comprehensive audit of all U.S. gold reserves — Fort Knox, West Point, Denver, and the New York Fed — with physical assay and inventory, conducted by an independent auditor hired by the Comptroller General, with a public report delivered to Congress and recurring audits every five years.

Senator Mike Lee introduced a companion bill in the Senate.

The House bill was referred to the Committee on Financial Services on June 6, 2025. No further action has occurred.

The bill that would finally answer the question — is the gold there? — has been sitting in committee for nearly a year, untouched, while the government continues to assure the public that everything is fine based on the government’s own internal reviews.

Thomas Massie, it should be noted, is gone from Congress. The man who introduced the bill no longer has a seat at the table. The coincidence is noted without further comment.

The Argument Against Auditing, and Why It Makes No Sense

The people who argue against auditing Fort Knox typically make one of three arguments.

The first argument is that it is too complicated. A full independent audit of 261 million troy ounces of gold would take approximately two to four years and cost somewhere between $60 million and $600 million depending on methodology. This is true. It is also the least compelling objection imaginable from a government that spends $6.5 trillion annually and recently approved several hundred billion dollars in emergency spending without a second thought. The cost of knowing whether our gold is there is a rounding error in the federal budget.

The second argument is that the Treasury’s internal audits are sufficient. This argument would not be accepted in any other context. No publicly traded company is permitted to conduct its own audits. No federal agency’s financial statements are self-certified. The entire architecture of financial oversight is built on the premise that internal review is insufficient — that independent verification is the standard, not the exception. The gold in Fort Knox is somehow exempt from a principle that applies to every other asset in the American economy.

The third argument is that questioning whether the gold is there makes you a conspiracy theorist. This is the most interesting argument because it confuses a reasonable question with a paranoid conclusion. Asking whether an asset that hasn’t been independently audited in seventy years should be independently audited is not a conspiracy theory. It is basic financial due diligence. The conspiracy theory is the specific claim that the gold is gone or has been stolen or secretly pledged to China. The audit demand is simply the mechanism by which that specific claim could be definitively disproved.

If the gold is there — all of it, in the quantity and purity the government claims — an independent audit proves it. Permanently. The conspiracy theories end. The questions go away. The United States gets to stand in front of the world and say: here is the verified, independently certified inventory of our gold reserves, conducted by an entity with no stake in the outcome.

What is the argument against that?

The Principle Underneath the Question

Amendment Media covers a specific kind of story: the gap between what public institutions tell the public and what the public has a right to know. The Fort Knox question is that story in its purest form.

The American people own that gold. It is a public asset held in public trust. Americans by-and-large are becoming sick of the perception carried by many of the elites in our government, that these endeavors belong to them and them alone, and only they are worthy to be included in the secrets of our nation. The accounting value assigned to it has not been updated in fifty-three years. The last independent verification of its existence occurred before the Beatles recorded their first album. Two of the most powerful men in the current administration loudly demanded an audit and then fell silent the moment a government official said everything was fine.

Nobody has explained why.

The gold either exists in the quantity the government claims, or it does not. An independent audit would resolve the question in either direction. The only scenario in which an independent audit is a problem is the scenario in which the government has something to hide.

That is not a conspiracy theory. That is logic.

The Gold Reserve Transparency Act sits in committee. The gold sits in Kentucky — allegedly. The question sits unanswered — definitively.

Somebody should ask it louder.

Amendment Media will keep asking.

Amendment Media | Jim Pearl

Florida is the 49th least affordable state in the country. Its median household income falls $45,381 short of what is needed to afford the median home under standard lending rules. Property taxes in Tampa and Jacksonville have risen nearly 60 percent since 2019. Homeowners insurance costs have surged as insurers have pulled back from the market. Grocery prices, energy costs, and auto insurance have climbed faster than wages.

By any objective measure, Florida has an affordability crisis. And for the first time in a long time, a Republican primary for governor is being fought almost entirely on that terrain.

On one side: Byron Donalds, the Trump-endorsed congressman from Naples who has raised $22 million and leads in every poll. On the other: James Fishback, a 30-year-old political newcomer and investor running an insurgent campaign built on a specific set of economic populist positions. The August 18, 2026 Republican primary is the test case. In a state that reliably elects the Republican nominee governor, whoever wins the primary wins the state.

The question Amendment Media is interested in is not who wins. It is whether the economic populist platform Fishback is running on has real political legs — and what the evidence says about each of his specific policy claims.

The Race

Donalds leads at 46 percent in the most recent Public Sentiment Institute poll, with Fishback at 35 percent and 19 percent undecided. An earlier Emerson College poll showed Donalds at 46 percent and Fishback at 4 percent — the wide variance reflects both the race’s fluidity and the challenge of polling a primary where name recognition still dominates.

What is consistent across every poll is one finding: Fishback leads Donalds by 40 points among voters aged 17-25. Among the broader electorate that decides primaries — older, more established Republican voters — Donalds dominates. The generational divide is the most analytically interesting data point in the race.

Donalds has Trump’s endorsement, a $22 million war chest, and the backing of much of Florida’s Republican congressional delegation. Fishback has Gen Z, a 67-county tour, and a platform built almost entirely around the cost of living.

The Platform — and What the Evidence Says

Fishback’s core proposals are specific enough to evaluate on the merits. Here is what the data shows about each one.

Blocking AI Data Centers

Fishback has pledged to stop construction of any AI data center that threatens to drive up electric bills, arguing the facilities consume enormous energy and water at Florida residents’ expense. PolitiFact rated his claims mostly accurate — AI data centers do drive up electric bills and can consume more than 500,000 gallons of water per day. The Florida Senate unanimously passed restrictions on large-scale data centers in February 2026, suggesting the concern crosses partisan lines within the state.

The policy tension is real: data centers bring jobs and tax revenue. The question of who pays the energy costs — the companies operating them or the residents whose grids they strain — is a legitimate economic dispute with no clean resolution.

Eliminating Homestead Property Taxes

Property taxes in Tampa have risen 56.7 percent and in Jacksonville 59.6 percent since 2019 — three Florida metros rank among the five biggest increases nationally over that period. The affordability pressure is documented and significant.

Fishback argues that 68 to 70 percent of Florida property tax revenue comes from second homes, investment properties, commercial properties, and Airbnbs — not primary residences — meaning elimination of homestead property taxes would not gut local government revenue. That specific figure has not been independently verified by Amendment Media and warrants scrutiny.

The counterargument is significant: property taxes fund schools, emergency services, and local infrastructure. A state that eliminates them for homestead properties must replace that revenue from somewhere — and the somewhere matters enormously for who ultimately bears the cost.

Stopping Institutional Buyers from Purchasing Florida Homes

This is the most nuanced of Fishback’s positions — because the evidence cuts against the scale of the problem he is describing, even if the underlying concern is legitimate.

Institutional investors represent 6.8 percent of all home sales nationally, down from a peak of 11.3 percent in late 2021. Blackstone owns approximately 0.06 percent of single-family homes in the United States — and its purchases are down over 90 percent since 2022. Trump signed an executive order in January 2026 preventing institutional buyers from purchasing single-family homes — suggesting the political salience of the issue transcends Fishback’s campaign, even if the economic impact is more limited than populist rhetoric suggests.

The more documented driver of Florida’s housing unaffordability is supply shortage, rising insurance costs, and pandemic-era migration. Institutional buyers are a legitimate long-term concern — concentration of housing in corporate hands raises real questions about community stability and wealth-building access. But the data suggests blocking Blackstone from buying Florida homes, while symbolically resonant, would not by itself move the needle significantly on affordability.

H-1B Visa Reform

Fishback has pledged to stop the replacement of Florida workers with H-1B visa holders, making it a central argument against Donalds, whom he accuses of serving tech industry interests over Florida workers. The argument connects directly to the broader AI displacement conversation — the same dynamic that eliminates entry-level positions domestically also incentivizes companies to import labor for positions that remain.

The policy question is complex: H-1B visas were designed to address genuine skills shortages. Critics argue they are systematically used to undercut American wages. The data supports both claims in different sectors and at different skill levels.

The Generational Signal

The most significant polling finding is not Fishback’s overall standing — it is his 40-point lead among voters aged 17-25.

This tracks with broader national data. Amendment Media has previously documented the collapse of The Daily Wire‘s youth audience and the corresponding decline in Gen Z support for Trump’s agenda — a generational realignment driven substantially by economic dissatisfaction rather than cultural disagreement. The young Republican voter who supports Fishback over Donalds is not necessarily more moderate. In many cases they are more economically radical — more willing to challenge corporate interests, more skeptical of donor influence, more focused on housing and groceries and energy than on the culture war issues that animate older Republican voters.

Whether that generational energy translates into primary votes is a different question. Primary electorates are older, more established, and more responsive to party endorsements. Trump’s endorsement of Donalds is worth, by one estimate, a 29-point swing among Republican primary voters who are informed of it. That is a structural advantage no amount of Gen Z enthusiasm easily overcomes in an August primary.

What This Race Is Actually Testing

The Florida governor’s race is functioning as a live experiment in a question that has no clean answer yet: can an economic populist platform — one focused on housing costs, energy bills, corporate ownership of residential real estate, and worker displacement — win a Republican primary against a Trump-endorsed establishment candidate?

The evidence from comparable races is mixed. Thomas Massie, whose cross-partisan economic accountability politics Amendment Media has covered, lost his primary to a Trump-backed opponent despite a genuine populist record. The institutional machinery of the Republican Party, when aligned with a presidential endorsement and a $22 million war chest, is formidable against an insurgent running on affordability.

What is different about the Florida race is the specific nature of the crisis. Florida is not an abstract case — it is a state where the numbers are stark, the cost increases are documented, and the residents feeling them are not a fringe. A household earning the median Florida income cannot afford the median Florida home. That is not a rhetorical complaint. It is arithmetic.

Whether arithmetic is enough to beat a $22 million war chest and a presidential endorsement is what August 18 will determine.

Amendment Media will be watching the results — and the margin among voters under 25.

Amendment Media will report on the outcome.

Amendment Media | Randy Flagg

Picture a line of a hundred Americans. Any hundred. Your neighbors, your coworkers, the people in the parking lot at the grocery store, the regulars at your church or your gym or your local diner. People with jobs and kids and mortgages and opinions about the weather.

Now picture twenty-five of them believing that political violence is justified.

That is not a hypothetical. That is the current state of the United States of America, documented by one of the country’s leading researchers on political violence — and it is getting worse, not better.

Who Robert Pape Is and Why You Should Listen

Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the founding director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. He is not a pundit. He is not a partisan. He is a researcher who has spent decades studying the conditions that produce political violence — in other countries, and now in this one.

Since 2021, his center has conducted quarterly nationally representative surveys measuring American attitudes toward political violence, fielded by NORC, one of the most respected survey organizations in the country. He has testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has published in Foreign Affairs. He has a new book — Our Own Worst Enemies: America and the Age of Violent Populism — that the nation’s leading scholars of democracy describe as essential reading.

He is not raising an alarm because it is fashionable or profitable to do so. He is raising an alarm because the data is raising it for him.

What the Data Shows

Political violence in the United States is now at its highest level since the 1970s. In the first half of 2025, there were roughly 150 recorded politically motivated attacks — almost double the number from the same period in 2024. The targets have crossed every line: an assassination attempt on a conservative Supreme Court Justice, two attempts on a Republican presidential candidate, the assassination of Democratic leaders in Minnesota, the killing of Charlie Kirk. Pape told Face the Nation in September 2025 that what we are seeing is not a continuation of long-standing trends. It is something new.

He calls it the era of violent populism.

The survey numbers are the part that should stop you cold. In May 2025, Pape’s center found that approximately 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove President Trump from the presidency. Approximately 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Trump’s agenda. Both numbers had more than doubled since Fall 2024.

Go back to that line of a hundred Americans. Walk down it. Every fourth person you pass — the neighbor, the coworker, the person in the parking lot — holds the belief that political violence is justified under some current political circumstance. Not a fringe militia member. Not a known extremist. An ordinary American with a job and a family and a lawn to mow.

That is where we are.

The Profile Has Changed

The most important finding in Pape’s research — and the one most likely to be misunderstood — is who these people are.

Our Own Worst Enemies documents that support for political violence against democratic institutions is now as likely to come from normal political activists with nice homes and 401(k)s as from the Proud Boys and the cast of characters who stormed the Capitol. The dangerous actor is no longer primarily the isolated, unemployed, socially marginal young man radicalized in a basement. The dangerous actor is your neighbor. The person at the school board meeting. The person who coached your kid’s Little League team and voted in every election and considers themselves a patriot.

This matters enormously for how we understand the threat. A fringe phenomenon can be monitored, contained, occasionally prosecuted. A mainstream phenomenon — one that has moved from the edges to the living rooms of ordinary Americans — cannot be policed away. It has to be addressed at the source.

Pape is careful and precise about what he is and is not saying. Seventy percent of Americans still abhor political violence in any of the situations presented in his surveys. The majority holds. But the fringes on both sides are growing, and the spiral dynamics — fear breeding retaliation breeding escalation — do not require a majority to produce catastrophic outcomes. They require only a determined and growing minority operating in an environment of political leaders who refuse to de-escalate.

The Fuel Underneath the Fire

Pape’s research identifies the conditions that produce violent populism. They are not mysterious. They are not primarily cultural. They are economic.

The populations most likely to support political violence are not the poorest Americans — they are the Americans who feel that a status they believed they had earned, or were promised, is being taken from them. The threatened middle. The people who followed the rules, worked the jobs, built the lives they were told to build — and then watched the institutions they trusted fail them, the politicians they elected serve other interests, and the economy they were promised deliver diminishing returns for everyone except the people at the top.

That is not a left-wing grievance or a right-wing grievance. It is an American grievance. And it is documented in the same polling data that shows 86 percent of Americans want to ban congressional stock trading, 82 percent want paid family leave, and a generation of college graduates cannot find entry-level work. The distance between what Americans were promised and what they are receiving is not abstract. It has a dollar amount. It has a zip code. It has a face.

Pape’s research does not make the policy argument explicitly — that is not his lane. But the connection between economic betrayal and political radicalization is not a new idea. It is one of the most documented relationships in the social science literature. People who believe the system is working do not blow it up. People who believe the system has been rigged against them — and who have evidence for that belief — are a different matter.

Amendment Media has been covering that evidence since the day we launched. This is why it matters.

The Political Class Is Making It Worse

Pape’s research consistently shows that when political leaders use rhetoric that threatens violence or characterizes opponents using dehumanizing language, public support for political violence rises. The causal relationship is documented. The leaders know it. Most of them do it anyway — because outrage is an effective fundraising mechanism, because dehumanizing the other side turns out voters, because the short-term incentives of political survival point directly toward the behaviors that produce long-term democratic collapse.

Pape has called for a bipartisan summit — Trump, Newsom, Pritzker, leaders from both parties — in which political leaders jointly and publicly condemn political violence as illegal, immoral, and un-American. He argues that calming statements from leaders can push back the tide the same way that inflammatory statements accelerate it.

The summit has not happened. The inflammatory statements have continued.

The unlike-the-1960s dimension of this moment is something Pape emphasizes. In previous eras of American political violence, the underlying grievances had specific, identifiable policy targets — civil rights, Vietnam. When those issues were addressed, or at least substantially changed, the violence subsided. The current environment is more nebulous, without a clear goal that both sides could work toward. The grievances are real but diffuse. The enemies are everywhere and nowhere. The promised land is undefined.

That is a more dangerous situation than a focused one. A movement with a specific demand can be satisfied or negotiated with. A movement animated by general rage at a system that has failed them — without a clear articulation of what success would look like — has no natural endpoint.

The 70 Percent and What They Need

The reason this is not a counsel of despair is the same reason Pape keeps doing the research: the majority still holds.

Seventy percent of Americans reject political violence. That is not a thin majority. That is a durable supermajority that has held through assassination attempts, January 6th, and everything that has happened since. It includes Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, people across every demographic category.

But that majority is passive. It does not organize. It does not march. It does not dominate the cable news cycle or fill the social media feeds. It goes to work and raises its kids and shakes its head at the news and hopes someone else is handling it.

Someone has to speak for them — not in the language of partisan warfare, but in the language of what actually unites them. The thing that unites the 70 percent is not an ideology. It is a shared stake in a country that functions, institutions that are trustworthy, and a political system that at least occasionally delivers what ordinary people actually want.

That is also, not coincidentally, what Amendment Media exists to cover.

Pape’s warning is not that the fire has already taken hold. It is that the conditions for it are in place, the kindling has been laid, and the people with the power to prevent it are choosing, day after day, not to.

The 70 percent who still reject this path are the only thing standing between the country that exists and the one Pape’s data is pointing toward.

They need to know what is at stake. They need someone to tell them clearly, without partisan spin, what the research actually shows and what it means.

That is what Amendment Media is here to do.

Amendment Media | Randy Flagg

Milton Friedman was not a socialist. The Nobel Prize-winning economist spent his career as the intellectual godfather of free market capitalism — the man whose ideas shaped Ronald Reagan’s economic policy, whose arguments against government intervention in markets became the foundation of modern conservative economics. He believed in competition, in individual choice, in the price mechanism as the most efficient allocator of resources human civilization has ever devised.

He also believed in a guaranteed income floor for every American.

Not as a concession to the left. Not as a reluctant compromise. As a logical extension of free market principles.

In Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1962, Friedman proposed replacing the existing welfare bureaucracy with what he called a Negative Income Tax — a mechanism by which Americans below a certain income threshold receive direct cash payments from the government rather than paying taxes into it, with the payment phasing out as income rises. His argument was not humanitarian. It was structural. The existing system of in-kind benefits, means-tested programs, and welfare bureaucracy was, in his view, inefficient, paternalistic, and corrosive to individual freedom — because it substituted government judgments about what poor people should have for the individuals’ own judgments about what they needed. Cash, by contrast, respects choice. It lets the market work. It treats the recipient as a capable adult rather than a dependent ward of the state.

He returned to the argument in Free to Choose in 1980, co-written with his wife Rose Friedman, making the case even more plainly: a simple income floor is not the enemy of a free market. It is a precondition for one. Because Friedman understood something that the current American debate has largely forgotten: a genuine free market requires that participants have real choices, and people who are one medical bill away from bankruptcy, or one layoff away from destitution, do not have real choices. They have the illusion of choices. A worker with no floor has no real bargaining power. They cannot walk away from a bad deal. They cannot take an entrepreneurial risk. They cannot participate in a market as a free agent — because they are not free.

Markets built on the illusion of choice are not free markets. They are something else.

This is not an argument for socialism. It is an argument that the strongest free market economies in the world have already run the experiment Friedman described — and the results are in.

The Steel Man: Why the Skeptics Are Not Wrong

Before making the case, the strongest objections deserve a genuine hearing. Because they are not frivolous.

The cost objection is the most powerful. A universal payment of $1,000 per month to all American adults costs approximately $3.1 trillion annually — more than the federal government spent on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined in 2021. Universal healthcare, depending on the model, would require redirecting or supplementing trillions more. These are not rounding errors. They are structural questions about the size and role of government that do not have easy answers.

The moral hazard objection is also serious. When you guarantee an outcome regardless of behavior, you change behavior. Economics 101. If people receive income without working, some will work less. If healthcare is free at the point of service, some will use more of it than they need. The question is not whether this happens — it does, at the margins — but whether the magnitude of the effect justifies the cost of the alternative.

The innovation objection is the one the free market conservative makes most forcefully: America’s healthcare system, for all its dysfunction, produces the majority of the world’s medical breakthroughs. Pharmaceutical innovation, surgical techniques, medical devices — the profit motive drives research that saves lives globally. A system that removes the price signal from healthcare risks removing the incentive to innovate. This is not nothing.

The freedom objection is philosophical but real: there is something distinctly American about the belief that individuals, not governments, should determine the course of their own lives. The resistance to government guarantees is not always selfishness. Sometimes it is a genuine conviction that dependency on the state corrodes something essential about the human character — the drive, the self-reliance, the willingness to take risks that built this country.

These arguments deserve respect. And they deserve a response.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

The Cato Institute — not a left-wing think tank — published a piece in 2025 titled “U.S. Health Care: The Free-Market Myth.” Its central argument is striking: among wealthy nations, the United States may have one of the least-free healthcare markets. The American system is not a free market that has failed — it is a heavily regulated, heavily subsidized hybrid that has produced the worst outcomes at the highest cost of any wealthy nation, while calling itself a market. The Cato piece argues that making healthcare more universal would actually require more market competition, not less — eliminating the regulatory and tax distortions that prevent genuine price competition from functioning.

That is worth sitting with. The most rigorous free market critique of American healthcare is not that it is too socialist. It is that it is not capitalist enough — that the current system is a cartel dressed up in market language, and that genuine competition would produce both lower costs and broader access.

On the income floor, Friedman’s position is instructive. He proposed a Negative Income Tax — a mechanism by which people below a certain income threshold receive payments from the government rather than paying taxes, with the payment phasing out as income rises. His argument was explicitly pro-market: unlike the existing welfare bureaucracy, which he viewed as inefficient, paternalistic, and distorting, a simple income floor would respect individual choice, reduce government overhead, and ensure that the labor market functioned with genuinely free participants rather than desperate ones. His endorsement of a basic income floor is, as one scholar noted, not aberrative or regrettable — it is essential to his case for free markets.

Singapore: The Model Nobody Talks About

When Americans debate universal healthcare, the examples cited are always Canada or the UK — single-payer systems with long wait times and government-run delivery. These are genuine tradeoffs worth examining. But they are not the only models.

Singapore has universal healthcare coverage for all its citizens and spends approximately 5 percent of GDP on healthcare — roughly half of what the United States spends — while achieving fourth-highest life expectancy in the world and the lowest infant mortality. It does this not through a government-run single-payer system but through a combination of mandatory personal health savings accounts, national catastrophic insurance, and a safety net fund for those who cannot afford care.

The mechanism is worth understanding. Every working Singaporean contributes between 8 and 10.5 percent of their salary to a personal Medisave account. That money belongs to them. They use it to pay for their own healthcare and their family’s. A national insurance scheme covers catastrophic costs. A government fund covers those who fall through the cracks. Public hospitals compete with private ones for patients — which keeps quality high and costs lower than they would otherwise be.

This is not socialized medicine. It is mandatory savings, market competition, and a safety net — three things that are entirely consistent with American values and entirely incompatible with the current American system.

As one analysis put it, Singapore has proved there is a middle way between free-market and socialized healthcare systems — universal healthcare without significant welfare spending. The United States could not simply replicate the Singaporean system overnight. The structural differences are real. But the assumption that universal coverage and market principles are incompatible has been definitively disproved by a country of 6 million people running the experiment for decades.

The American Touch

What would a version of this look like that fits the American character — the one that values individual responsibility, distrusts large government bureaucracy, and believes in the dignity of work?

It would not look like Medicare for All as currently proposed — a single-payer system that eliminates private insurance and centralizes all healthcare decisions in the federal government. That model trades one set of problems for another.

It might look more like this:

A mandatory health savings account — every working American contributes a percentage of their income to a personal account, owned by them, used for routine care. The money is theirs. They keep what they don’t spend. They make the choices about how to use it.

Catastrophic coverage — a national insurance pool covers the costs that individual savings cannot — the cancer diagnosis, the car accident, the chronic condition that would otherwise bankrupt a family. This is the one thing private insurance does poorly and government does adequately: pool risk across the entire population.

A genuine safety net — not a bureaucratic maze of programs with different eligibility rules and application requirements, but a simple income floor of the kind Friedman described: below a certain income, you receive support. Above it, you don’t. No caseworkers. No asset tests. No dignity tax for needing help.

Market competition everywhere else — drug pricing, insurance products, elective care, provider networks. Let them compete. Remove the regulations that protect incumbents and cartelize prices. Trust that competition produces better outcomes than consolidation, because it does.

This is not a left-wing program. It is not a right-wing program. It is a pragmatic one — built on the observation that the most successful market economies in the world have solved the problem of baseline security without abandoning the principles that make markets work.

What the Resistance Is Actually About

The most honest version of the debate is not really about markets versus government. It is about who bears the cost of a floor that most Americans — when asked directly — believe should exist.

Forty-one percent of American adults, approximately 100 million people, carry medical debt. A March 2025 Gallup poll found that 31 million Americans borrowed an estimated $74 billion to cover medical costs in 2024 alone. These are not people who are gaming a generous system. They are people who followed the rules, worked the jobs, paid the premiums — and still ended up with bills they cannot pay.

The free market conservative is right that markets allocate resources more efficiently than governments in most domains. The free market conservative is also right that guarantees change behavior at the margins. What the free market conservative has not adequately answered is what a market society owes to the person who loses the market’s lottery — not through laziness or bad choices, but through the randomness that governs human life.

The American answer, for most of its history, has been: nothing guaranteed. Pull yourself up. That answer has produced extraordinary dynamism and innovation. It has also produced 100 million people in medical debt and a generation of workers one layoff away from losing everything — people who cannot take the entrepreneurial risks that markets depend on because the floor beneath them does not exist.

The strongest free market economies have figured out that a floor beneath the market does not weaken it. It makes the participants braver. It makes the risks more rational. It makes the choices more real.

That is not a left-wing argument. That is Milton Friedman’s argument. And Singapore’s. And Germany’s. And every other wealthy market democracy that has solved the problem the United States is still pretending does not exist.

The floor and the free market are not opposites. They were always meant to work together. The only question is whether America is willing to learn that from the evidence — or whether it will keep insisting on an ideological purity that no other successful market economy has ever actually practiced.

Amendment Media exists to ask that question — and to follow wherever the evidence leads.

Amendment Media | Jim Pearl

On April 17, 2026, Elon Musk posted on X that “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.” The post drew 32 million views within hours. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has endorsed a similar concept. A New York state legislator running for Congress has called direct payments a necessary “insurance policy.” A UK government minister is weighing the same idea.

The question of whether artificial intelligence displacement should be met with universal income has moved from the fringes of policy debate to its center. What has not yet been settled — and what the debate largely avoids — is the more specific question underneath it: if a safety net for AI-displaced workers is necessary, who should fund it?

That question has more than one serious answer. This piece documents them.

The Scale of the Problem the Policy Is Trying to Solve

Before evaluating the funding proposals, it is worth establishing what they are responding to.

Nearly 78,600 tech workers were laid off in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with approximately 48 percent of those cuts attributed directly to AI and workflow automation. The World Economic Forum projects that 30 percent of current U.S. jobs could be automated by 2030, with 60 percent seeing significant task modification. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar positions. Goldman Sachs has estimated displacement of 6 to 7 percent of the U.S. workforce.

These projections vary in their specifics and timeframes. They do not vary in their direction. The displacement is coming. The policy question is what, if anything, the government and private sector should do about it — and who should bear the cost.

Position 1: Government-Funded Universal Income (The Musk-Altman Proposal)

The most prominent proposal is the simplest to describe: the federal government issues regular payments to all Americans, or to displaced workers specifically, funded through general taxation.

Musk has described his version — which he calls “Universal HIGH Income” rather than UBI, suggesting more generous payments than traditional basic income proposals — as the most practical response to what he sees as inevitable mass unemployment. He argues that AI and robotics will produce goods and services far in excess of any inflationary effect, making the payments fiscally sustainable. Altman has funded experimental pilots through his OpenResearch project and argues that direct payments allow individuals to navigate displacement on their own terms rather than being funneled into government-directed retraining programs.

The experimental evidence from pilot programs is cautiously encouraging on one specific question. Altman’s own pilots, along with trials in Stockton, California and elsewhere, consistently find that regular unconditional payments result in greater spending on basic needs, modest reductions in work hours, and — contrary to the common assumption — continued labor force participation among most recipients. People receiving guaranteed income do not, on average, stop working.

The case for it: It is administratively simple. It does not require the government to predict which industries will be disrupted or which retraining programs will produce employable skills. It treats workers as capable of making their own decisions about how to navigate economic transition. It provides a floor that prevents displacement from becoming destitution.

The case against it: The cost is substantial. A universal payment of $1,000 per month to all American adults would cost approximately $3 trillion annually — roughly 75 percent of current federal discretionary and mandatory spending combined. Even a more targeted program for displaced workers only would require sustained funding at a scale that has no current legislative path. Critics from both the left and right have pointed out that the Musk-Altman version places the full fiscal burden on taxpayers broadly — including workers who have already been displaced and are paying into a system that their displacement has strained.

The deeper structural critique is that government-funded UBI socializes the cost of a disruption whose benefits accrue primarily to the companies and shareholders deploying AI. If the productivity gains from AI flow to corporations and their investors, and the safety net costs flow to the public treasury, the distribution of gains and losses runs in precisely opposite directions.

Position 2: An Automation Tax (The Robot Tax Proposal)

The automation tax — sometimes called a robot tax — attempts to close that gap directly. Rather than funding a safety net through general taxation, it levies the companies deploying AI to replace workers, directing the revenue toward displaced workers or retraining programs.

Bill Gates first proposed the concept in 2017. Senate Democrats formalized it in a 2025 report called The Big Tech Oligarchs’ War Against Workers, which projected that AI and automation could eliminate nearly 100 million U.S. jobs within a decade and proposed taxing companies that use AI to expand automation, with revenue directed to harmed workers. OpenAI’s own April 2026 policy blueprint — a 13-page document released the same month nearly half of all Q1 tech layoffs were attributed to AI industry-wide — included a version of the robot tax alongside proposals for a four-day workweek at full pay and a public wealth fund.

Tax scholars at Texas A&M have argued the levy is not just economically sound but structurally inevitable: the U.S. tax system is built on taxing labor. If labor is replaced by machines that pay no payroll taxes, the revenue base collapses. A robot tax is, in this framing, less a penalty on innovation than a correction for a structural gap that automation creates in the public finances.

A March 2026 academic paper from researchers at Penn and elsewhere found that of six policy responses evaluated — including UBI, upskilling programs, capital income taxes, and worker equity participation — only a Pigouvian automation tax set equal to the uninternalized demand loss per task fully corrects the market distortion that automation creates. Their argument: when companies automate en masse, they collectively destroy the consumer demand that all companies depend on, creating a negative externality that the market does not price. A tax internalizes that externality.

The case for it: It places the cost burden on the party generating the displacement and the profit. It preserves the tax base. It creates a direct financial link between the disruption and the remedy.

The case against it: Critics argue it disincentivizes innovation and reduces U.S. competitiveness relative to countries that do not impose similar levies. As one libertarian analysis put it, there was no Model T tax, no levy on the cotton gin, and no fine for using computers — and U.S. prosperity was built on embracing those transitions, not taxing them. Overseas competitors adopting AI without such levies could undercut American companies, ultimately costing more jobs than the tax saves. The definitional challenge is also real: what precisely counts as an automating displacement, and how is it measured and verified?

Position 3: Worker Equity Participation

A third model shifts from transfers to ownership. Rather than paying displaced workers through taxes or government checks, it proposes giving workers equity stakes in the AI systems that replace them — making workers shareholders in the productivity gains their displacement generates.

Sam Altman has proposed a version of this through his Worldcoin project, which aims to distribute a global digital currency. Vinod Khosla, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, has advocated for restructuring the tax code so that workers receive a share of AI-generated productivity directly. The concept draws on the logic of sovereign wealth funds — Norway’s oil fund being the most cited example — applied to AI productivity rather than natural resource extraction.

The case for it: It aligns incentives rather than simply redistributing income. Workers who own stakes in AI productivity have a direct interest in its success rather than a dependent relationship with the companies deploying it. It avoids the fiscal burden of government-funded UBI while providing workers with assets rather than transfers.

The case against it: Implementation requires either mandatory corporate restructuring or voluntary participation that history suggests will not materialize at scale. It also does not address the immediate income gap for workers displaced today, whose equity stakes — if they received them — would provide no near-term income security. The distribution mechanism remains largely theoretical.

Position 4: Retraining and Job Creation (The Incumbent Congressional Response)

The bills currently moving through Congress — the AI Workforce PREPARE Act, the Workforce of the Future Act, the AI Workforce Training Act — share a common framework: invest in retraining programs and tax credits for companies that offer AI career development, preparing workers for the jobs that AI creates rather than compensating them for the jobs it eliminates.

The Workforce of the Future Act authorizes $90 million in grants for workforce training. The AI Workforce Training Act offers tax credits to companies providing AI career development programs. The AI Workforce PREPARE Act directs the Department of Labor to study what a rapid adjustment assistance program for AI-displaced workers would look like.

The case for it: It addresses the skills mismatch directly. It preserves the labor force participation model rather than substituting transfers for work. It has more legislative momentum than any UBI or automation tax proposal currently before Congress.

The case against it: Ninety million dollars in training grants is not a serious response to an estimated $1.2 trillion in projected wage losses. The trade adjustment assistance programs that served as the model for these proposals — designed for workers displaced by trade agreements — have a documented record of limited effectiveness: participants in those programs historically had worse long-term employment outcomes than comparable workers who did not participate. Retraining assumes there are jobs to retrain into. If AI eliminates categories of work across multiple sectors simultaneously, the destination of the retraining is unclear.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

The honest summary of the research is that no single proposal has been tested at the scale the displacement problem requires, and the evidence that exists is partial.

UBI pilots show that unconditional payments do not destroy work incentives. Finland ran the world’s first nationwide, statutory basic income experiment from 2017 to 2018 — 2,000 randomly selected unemployed citizens receiving €560 monthly — and found modest increases in employment, significant improvements in wellbeing, and no meaningful reduction in labor force participation. What these experiments have not tested is fiscal sustainability at full population scale, because no country has yet implemented universal income covering its entire population rather than a targeted subset.

The automation tax has theoretical support and structural logic, but no country has implemented one at the scale proposed, and the competitiveness objection has not been resolved.

Worker equity participation is largely conceptual. The retraining programs with actual track records have underperformed.

What the evidence does show clearly is that the cost of doing nothing is also real and also distributed — to the workers who absorb the displacement, to the public systems that support them, and to the consumer demand that a generation of underemployed workers cannot generate.

The Question the Debate Has Not Answered

The policy proposals currently in circulation share a common feature: they differ primarily on who bears the cost of a transition whose benefits are already being captured by a specific and identifiable set of companies and shareholders.

Government-funded UBI places the cost on all taxpayers. Retraining grants place it on discretionary federal spending. An automation tax places it on the companies generating the displacement. Worker equity participation attempts to restructure ownership of the gains themselves.

Each of these is a legitimate policy position with documented arguments for and against it. What is not a position supported by evidence is that no response is necessary — that the labor market will self-correct at a pace and scale that makes the displaced workers whole without intervention.

The displacement is documented. The policy debate is live. The question of who should pay for it is the one that Congress has not yet answered — and the one that will determine, more than any specific program design, whether the transition to an AI economy produces broadly shared prosperity or concentrates its gains in the hands of the people who built the machine.

Amendment Media will keep tracking the votes.

Amendment Media | Jim Pearl

There is a version of America where Congress passes laws that most Americans actually want.

In that version, you can afford your insulin. Members of Congress cannot trade stocks on inside information. New parents get paid time off to be with their children. The money flowing from corporations and foreign governments into political campaigns is constrained by law rather than protected by it.

That version of America is not a fantasy. It is the direct result of polling — consistent, bipartisan, cross-demographic polling conducted over years by institutions ranging from Fox News to the University of Maryland to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The American people have been registering their preferences clearly and repeatedly. Congress has been ignoring them just as clearly and just as repeatedly.

This is not a partisan observation. The bills that would translate these preferences into law have sponsors from both parties. The polling that documents public support comes from pollsters on both ends of the ideological spectrum. The obstruction comes from both parties equally — because both parties are funded by the same donor classes whose profits depend on these laws never passing.

What follows is not a wish list. It is a legislative record — of bills that exist, sponsors who have signed them, and public support that has been documented. The only missing ingredient is a Congress willing to vote for what its constituents actually want.

1. Ban Members of Congress from Trading Stocks

Public support: 86 percent. Bills introduced: Yes. Passed: No.

The number is not 51 percent. It is not a slim majority. According to a University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation survey, 86 percent of Americans — 87 percent of Republicans, 88 percent of Democrats, and 81 percent of independents — support prohibiting members of Congress from trading individual stocks.

The legislation exists. The bipartisan Restore Trust in Congress Act was introduced in the Senate in January 2026 by Republican Senator Ashley Moody of Florida and Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Its House companion, led by Republican Chip Roy of Texas and Democrat Seth Magaziner of Rhode Island, has 126 cosponsors. A discharge petition has gathered 79 signatures from both parties. It has not come to a full House vote.

The reason is not complicated. Members of Congress made 9,261 individual stock trades in 2024 alone, involving 706 million shares. Approximately one in three members traded stocks or other financial assets from 2019 to 2021, with at least 3,700 of those trades posing potential conflicts of interest with their committee responsibilities. The people with the power to pass the ban are the same people who benefit from there being no ban.

The discharge petition has 79 signatures. It needs 218. The gap between those two numbers is not a policy disagreement. It is a reflection of how many members of Congress have calculated that passing the ban would cost them more than failing to pass it.

2. Cap Insulin at $35 for All Americans

Public support: Supermajority. Bills introduced: Yes. Passed: Partially.

This one is partially a success story — which makes the remaining failure more instructive, not less.

In 2022, Congress capped insulin costs at $35 per month for Medicare recipients. It was a significant step for seniors. It left everyone else behind. Americans with private insurance — the majority of the diabetic population — continued paying whatever their insurer and pharmacy benefit manager decided to charge, which in many cases ran hundreds of dollars per month for a drug whose manufacturing cost is under ten dollars.

In March 2026, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the INSULIN Act of 2026, which would extend the $35 cap to all commercially insured Americans. The bill was co-authored by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Republican Susan Collins of Maine, Democrat Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and Republican John Kennedy of Louisiana. Four senators. Two parties. One straightforward extension of a policy that already works for seniors.

The bill has not passed.

The insulin story is a precise illustration of how Washington operates on issues with supermajority public support. A partial solution passes when political conditions briefly align. The complete solution — the one that covers everyone — remains pending indefinitely, hostage to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries whose profits depend on the current pricing structure. Every American diabetic who cannot afford insulin already knows who is paying for that arrangement. The donor records make it visible to everyone else.

3. Guarantee Paid Family Leave

Public support: 82 percent. Bills introduced: Yes. Passed: No.

The United States is the only wealthy nation in the world that does not guarantee paid leave to new parents. This is not a contested observation — it is a documented fact about American labor policy that has remained true for decades while every peer nation in the developed world has moved in the opposite direction.

The polling is consistent regardless of who conducts it. A YouGov survey of 21,000 Americans found 82 percent support for paid maternity leave. A Navigator Research poll found 69 percent of Republicans, 77 percent of independents, and 90 percent of Democrats supporting a national paid family and medical leave program. The number has barely moved in years, because public support for this policy is not a fluctuating opinion. It is a settled preference.

The FAMILY Act was first introduced in 2013. It has been reintroduced repeatedly in the years since. It has never passed.

The argument against it is not that Americans don’t want it. The argument is always cost, always complexity, always some procedural reason why this particular Congress cannot address this particular issue in this particular session. The argument has been made for thirteen consecutive years while American parents continue to be the only workers in the developed world legally entitled to nothing when a child arrives.

And people wonder why nobody is having kids.

The donor math is not complicated. The industries that would bear the costs of a national paid leave program have spent generously ensuring that the political conditions for passing it never fully materialize. The 82 percent of Americans who support the policy are not organized into a donor class. They are organized into a voting public — which, as the system currently functions, is a less efficient form of political power than a checkbook.

4. Get the Money Out

Public support: Broad. Legislation: Proposed. Passed: No.

This is the issue underneath all the other issues. It is the reason the stock trading ban has 86 percent support and no floor vote. It is the reason insulin costs $300 when it costs $10 to make. It is the reason paid family leave has been pending for thirteen years. It is the reason Thomas Massie lost his seat for working with Ro Khanna on a bill that lobbyists didn’t write.

The mechanics are not complicated. A donor class funds campaigns. The politicians who receive that money pass legislation that benefits the donor class. The politicians who refuse get primaried with the donor class’s money. The process repeats. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented transaction, visible in FEC filings, voting records, and the gap between public polling and legislative outcomes that this article has been cataloguing.

Multiple reform proposals exist in various stages of legislative development — from the DISCLOSE Act requiring dark money disclosure to more sweeping proposals for public campaign financing. None has passed, for the obvious reason that the people who would pass it are the people who benefit from it not passing.

The evidence for why this matters is not abstract. It is the three items listed above: a stock trading ban with 86 percent support and no floor vote, an insulin cap that covers seniors but not the broader diabetic population, and a paid family leave bill pending for thirteen consecutive years. Each one has the votes of the public. None has the votes of Congress. The explanation is the same in every case.

The List

If Congress voted tomorrow on what Americans actually want — not what their donors want, not what their party leadership wants, but what the documented public preference of their constituents demands — the following laws would pass:

A ban on congressional stock trading, sponsored by members of both parties, supported by 86 percent of Americans, would become law.

A $35 insulin cap covering all Americans with private insurance, sponsored by senators from both parties, would become law.

A national paid family leave guarantee, supported by more than 80 percent of Americans across party lines, would become law after thirteen years of waiting.

A prescription drug price negotiation framework giving the government leverage over pharmaceutical pricing would become law.

Disclosure requirements for dark money in political campaigns would become law.

Meaningful constraints on foreign government influence in American elections would become law.

None of these are radical proposals. None require a fundamental restructuring of the American economy. All of them have documented supermajority public support. All of them have been introduced in Congress. None of them have passed in their complete form.

The distance between what Americans want and what Congress delivers is not a mystery. It has an explanation, and the explanation has a donor list.

Amendment Media will publish it.

Amendment Media | Randy Flagg

Cenk Uygur and Shawn Ryan should not agree on anything.

Uygur is the founder of The Young Turks, one of the longest-running progressive news programs in the history of online media, and a co-founder of Justice Democrats — the organization built to pull the Democratic Party away from corporate money and toward the people. Ryan is a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who built one of the most popular podcasts in the country on the back of a predominantly conservative, military, and law enforcement audience. In the current American media landscape, these two men are supposed to be enemies. The algorithm demands it.

On May 4, 2026, they sat down together for three and a half hours on The Shawn Ryan Show — Episode 301, “The Foreign Influence Crisis.” Two men from opposite ends of the political spectrum looked at the same country, arrived at the same diagnosis, and proposed the same solution.

A constitutional amendment to get money out of politics. Everything else, they agreed, comes after.

“Politically Homeless”

Ryan opened with a confession that would have been unthinkable from someone in his lane five years ago. He said he’d always thought of himself as a Republican. Turns out, he said, he wasn’t a Republican. He wasn’t a Democrat either. He was just an American who wanted to fix things. He used a phrase he credited to Joe Rogan: politically homeless. The perfect term, he said.

What followed was not a debate. It was a shared autopsy of a political system both men believe has been captured — not by one party or the other, but by money itself. Corporate money. Foreign government money. The money that flows so reliably from donor to politician to policy that Uygur called it what it is: systemic bribery.

The mechanics are not complicated. A donor class funds political campaigns. The politicians who receive that money pass legislation that benefits the donor class. The return on investment is extraordinary — Uygur cited AIPAC’s roughly $127 million in combined spending during the last election cycle as one example of a donor class purchasing billions in policy return. The same dynamic applies to pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, financial institutions. The names change. The mechanics don’t.

“They’re all prostitutes,” Uygur said of American politicians. “And mainstream media is the getaway driver.”

Ryan did not disagree.

What They Agree On — and Why It Matters

The most important exchange wasn’t about any specific policy. It was about the structure of the disagreement itself.

Ryan said it plainly: abortion, trans issues, taxes, race — these are the issues that get amplified, debated, and never resolved. They are “batted back and forth until the end of time.” And they are used, deliberately, to divide people who would otherwise find common cause.

Uygur had been making the same argument for twenty years on The Young Turks. What passes for bipartisan unity in Washington, he said, is always a giveaway to corporations and donor classes. What divides the country is everything else. Paid family leave has 84 percent public support. It cannot pass. Not because of a policy disagreement — because the politicians who would pass it answer to their donors, not their constituents.

This is not a left-wing argument. It is not a right-wing argument. It is a documented description of how the American legislative process functions — visible in voting records, donor filings, and the persistent gap between what polls show Americans want and what Congress delivers.

“I think more people are becoming politically homeless,” Ryan said, “and I think we’re all kind of seeing that.”

He is right. The conversation he had with Uygur is evidence of it.

The Amendment

Both men arrived at the same destination: a constitutional amendment to remove corrupting money from American politics.

Not a campaign finance reform bill. Not a new regulatory framework. An amendment — the mechanism the founders built into the document for exactly this kind of fundamental correction. The word implies not just change but repair. A return to what was supposed to be.

The argument is straightforward. Legislation can be bought. Regulators can be captured. Courts can be appointed by administrations funded by the same donor classes they are meant to constrain. The only mechanism that operates above all of these is the Constitution itself. If money in politics is the root cause — and both Uygur and Ryan believe it is — then the only durable solution is a constitutional prohibition on the corruption.

Uygur has been making this argument for years. What is new is who he is making it to — and who is agreeing.

What Comes After the Money

Both men acknowledged that culture war issues — abortion, immigration, gun rights, gender — are real disagreements that real people hold with real conviction. The argument is not that those issues don’t matter. The argument is that none of them can be addressed honestly or durably while the political system is owned by donor classes with no interest in resolution.

In a system where every politician is answerable first to the people who funded their campaign, the culture war is not just a distraction. It is a business model. The fights that never resolve are the fights that keep the donor money flowing, the audiences engaged, and the attention away from the extraction happening in the background.

Get the money out first. Then have the real arguments. Then let the democratic process produce outcomes that reflect what Americans actually want rather than what their donors have purchased.

It is a simple idea. It is also the most threatening idea in American politics — because it threatens the business model of both parties simultaneously.

Why This Conversation Matters Beyond the Podcast

The Shawn Ryan Show is not a fringe operation. It consistently ranks among the top podcasts in the country, built on an audience of military veterans, law enforcement, and conservatives. Uygur is not a fringe figure. He built the largest progressive news operation in the history of online media and has been making the money-in-politics argument longer than almost anyone in independent media.

When these two audiences hear their respective voices arrive at the same conclusion, something happens that is different from any single political argument. A permission structure forms. The progressive listener hears that a heavily conservative former operator agrees with Uygur on the fundamental diagnosis. The conservative listener hears that their guy is sitting across from the progressive founder — and nodding.

That permission structure is how political coalitions form outside the two-party system. Not through top-down party organizing, but through the slow accumulation of moments where people from different worlds recognize each other across the divide.

Ryan called it being politically homeless. Uygur called it being at the bottom of Pandora’s box — nearly at hope.

Amendment Media would put it differently: there are people on both sides of the culture war who are tired of the war and ready to fight the real one. The Uygur-Ryan conversation is a dispatch from that coalition. It is not yet organized. It does not yet have a party or a candidate or a constitutional amendment on the ballot.

But it has a diagnosis. And in a country this confused about what is actually wrong, that is where everything begins.

Amendment Media | Randy Flagg

Thomas Massie committed a crime against the Washington establishment. He told you what it was himself, on national television.

“I think the biggest crime I committed against the swamp,” the Republican congressman from Kentucky told Meet the Press host Kristen Welker on Sunday, “was showing the American people that somebody on the right could join somebody on the left and get something done.”

What they got done was the Epstein Files Transparency Act — legislation requiring the Department of Justice to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein, co-authored by Massie and Democratic California Representative Ro Khanna. It passed 427–1. Trump signed it in November. And then the establishment went to work.

Last Tuesday, Massie lost his Republican primary to Ed Gallrein — a Trump-backed former Navy SEAL — by nearly ten points. The race drew more than $32 million in advertising spending, most of it funded by donor networks aligned with interests Massie had spent years antagonizing. It was the most expensive congressional primary in 250 years of American history. The message to every other member of Congress was clear: cross the right people and we will spend whatever it takes to remove you.

Ro Khanna was watching. On the same broadcast, the California Democrat described his reaction in two words: “Sadness, disappointment.” He said Massie “was taken out for two reasons. One, he had the courage to go after some very powerful people in working with me to get the Epstein Transparency Act passed. And second, he worked with me to stop this war in Iran. So for taking on the Epstein class and taking on war, he basically lost his seat.”

The Punishment for Effectiveness

Massie himself identified the specific moment his fate was sealed — not his votes against the deficit, not his opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill, not even his criticism of the Iran war. It was the Epstein bill.

“That’s probably the only bill that’s passed Washington, D.C., in the last ten years that lobbyists haven’t written,” he told Welker. “It was written by me and Ro Khanna, and we used the pressure of the American people to cross the aisle and get things done. That’s when they decided I had to be taken out, that I was becoming effective.”

Read that again. The bill that ended his career was dangerous to the establishment precisely because ordinary people’s representatives wrote it — not lobbyists. In the current architecture of American politics, that is what makes a congressman worth $32 million to destroy.

Where America Actually Agrees

The political class has spent decades insisting that Americans are hopelessly divided. The polling says otherwise.

On congressional stock trading, support for a ban runs at approximately 85 percent across party lines. A bipartisan discharge petition was gaining real momentum in late 2025 — until House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries quietly steered Democrats away from signing it, instead filing a competing petition designed to include provisions no Republican would ever support. The bill died. Meanwhile, 113 members of Congress made 9,261 trades involving 706 million shares in 2024 alone. Both parties protected the arrangement.

On prescription drug pricing, poll after poll shows Americans across the spectrum want the government to negotiate directly. The underlying mandate — stop letting pharmaceutical companies set prices without any check — commands supermajority support. The industry’s lobbying apparatus has spent years ensuring that support never becomes sufficient legislation.

On paid family leave — twelve weeks for a new parent — support runs at 84 percent nationally. It cannot pass. There is no serious policy disagreement underlying that failure. There is only a donor class that has calculated it is not in their interest to allow it.

The pattern across every one of these issues is identical. Americans agree. Washington doesn’t act. The gap between those two facts is filled, reliably and profitably, by the donor class that funds the campaigns of members who refuse to vote for what their constituents want.

A Different Kind of Bipartisanship

What Massie and Khanna represent is not traditional bipartisanship. Traditional bipartisanship in Washington means both parties agree to give something to their donors. The Massie-Khanna axis is something different: a libertarian-leaning Republican and a progressive Democrat finding common cause not on ideology, but on the specific question of who the government actually serves.

Massie was not a team player. He voted against foreign aid across the board. He voted against the deficit-busting reconciliation bill. He voted against the Iran war authorization. Khanna was not a conventional Democrat either — he co-founded Justice Democrats to build a lane for candidates who refuse corporate PAC money, and called out Jeffries publicly for killing the stock trading ban.

These two represent what a post-culture-war politics might actually look like in practice. Not an ideology. A methodology: identify the interests that have captured the government, build coalitions to confront them regardless of party, and use the pressure of ordinary people to get things done.

The establishment spent $32 million removing one of them from Congress.

What Comes Next

Massie is gone from the House, at least for now. He did not rule out a future run. The voters who backed him in every previous cycle are still there — they weren’t persuaded, they were outspent.

Khanna, speaking on national television about a Republican colleague he called a real friend and a good man, was describing something the American political press does not have adequate language for: a friendship forged not across party lines but beneath them — at the level where the real question isn’t left versus right, but people versus power.

That is the question Amendment Media exists to cover. Thomas Massie paid a significant price for asking it from inside the Republican Party.

The swamp spent $32 million answering him. It hasn’t answered the question.