Originally published April 10, 2026 for our weekly Issue of Mindful Intelligence Advisor. Subscribe to get weekly issues.
DATE: 26-01-01 to 26-03-31
By STAFF
“Mr. Speaker, in 1848, Karl Marx said, a progressive income tax is needed to transfer wealth and power to the state. Thus, Marx’s Communist Manifesto had as its major economic tenet a progressive income tax. Think about it, 1848 Karl Marx, Communism…. I say it is time to replace the progressive income tax with a national retail sales tax, and it is time to abolish the IRS, my colleagues. I yield back all the rules, regulations, fear, and intimidation of our current system.” – James Traficant
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This deepdive covers the first 3 months of the year. In the first 10 days of April the patterns we outline here have only continued. For the purpose of this deepdive, however, we are only analyzing progressive action in the first three months of the year.
The pattern we outline is progressive, not American. Wherever and whenever progressives are called to choose between America and the rest of the world, they inevitably choose the rest of the world.
Wherever and whenever progressives are called to choose between self-stewardship empowerment and safety and security, they almost always choose safety and security (granted by coercive state and corporate action).
These are not habits of being for Americans, they are only habits of being for progressives. Americans live boldly next to neighbors who hold values outside their own. Progressives seek corporate and state power to assure the neighbor’s values are never seen or heard in public.
This is not a value judgment on progressives, but rather a statement of fact; progressives are NOT Americans and Americans are NOT progressives. We live in a land with two nations, and neither one can co-exist with the other anymore.
BACKGROUND
What follows are bellwether examples of progressives in action over the last three months alone. This is not comprehensive; no matter what we end up choosing as our bellwethers, we’re sure later we’ll wish we had included another bellwether instead.
Yet, imperfectly as it will be, it will present a progressive nation in action whose values are objectively antithetical to America’s values. Progressives value the international over the national, including the American national. They value protected classes over individual merit. They invite state censorship and empower the state to compel individual speech.
The progressives fear the individual more than they fear Islamist terrorists.
These will be brief, but links will be provided.
- PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP – The last Presidential candidate of the progressives, Kamala Harris, openly praised and encouraged the anti-ICE operations during the currently most violent period of President Trump’s deportation operations.
The progressives’ flag bearer in the Senate is Chuck Schumer of NY, who also happens to be the Senate Minority Leader. He is now proposing the partisan rainbow flag be given the same protected status as the U.S. flag.
The progressives’ flagbearer in the U.S. House, Hakeem Jeffries, also of NY, told Americans, “The last thing that the American people need are for untrained ICE agents to be deployed at airports all across the country, potentially to brutalize or, in some instances, kill them.”
The early frontrunner to be the flagbearer for the progressives in the 2028 Presidential race, Gavin Newsome of CA, recently said of ICE agents who were in the midst of facing coordinated anti-ICE attacks, “I want to remember all those images of masked men, the secret police, something familiar in Germany.”
U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Schiltz symbolizes the blurred lines progressives have between serving constitutionally and serving progressive values. The Judge famously refused to issue arrest warrants for the progressives who engaged in an anti-ICE disruption campaign in a place of worship during one of its services.
He refused to prosecute anti-ICE activists who had clearly violated numerous civil and criminal laws because he is an anti-ICE activist himself, having contributed to anti-ICE groups.
- PROGRESSIVE MEDIA – A recent article in Townhall highlighted “… a List of All the Hoaxes CNN’s Broadcast over the years,” with the latest one coming from their claim that two Islamist terrorists were “two Pennsylvania teenagers…” who were in NY “for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather.”
The same post implied Mamdani was the target of the attacks and not the anti-Islamist Christian nationalists who were attacked with tossed improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
If the FCC is to be believed, the network news outlets appear to be using fake news to push a pro-Iran, anti-America, anti-Israel narrative. FCC Chair Brendan Carr warned the broadcasters that “are running hoaxes and news distortions – also known as the fake news – have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up.”
Three recent examples of the progressive media’s coverage of the Trump deportation operation share a pattern of hyperbole aimed at vilifying ICE agents while favoring illegal aliens and anti-ICE activists.
ABC and CBC both protected the anti-ICE activists by refusing to cover the story of a hotel being assaulted by an anti-ICE mob. CNN allowed a guest to claim deportation centers are “concentration camps,” a claim that was unchecked by the host, Jake Tapper.
The anti-ICE activist, Jamie Schwesnedl, said, “We can’t do business as usual right now anyway because our city has been invaded by masked gunmen kidnapping family members and friends and neighbors of ours to send them to concentration camps.”
- CHILDREN’S ARMIES – Two Pro-Hamas groups that teach children the evil of whiteness have been allowed into our public schools by progressive school boards and districts. They are only a sample of similar anti-American, anti-white groups being given access to our children in public schools.
The National Education Association recently held a training session called “Advocacy and Free Speech Rights for K-12 Education” that seeks to establish the oughtness of woke ideology as the oughtness of human life. This action is sectarian in nature, which challenges its legality given the alleged non-partisanship the organization is expected to maintain.
The current payoff of years of progressive-controlled education is the creation of a children’s army of sorts, an anti-American protest group easily recruited and organized in public schools by progressive activist teachers.
Yet while progressives are successful in creating progressive activists among children, they are failing at teaching the children the basics of their own country, America. A super-majority of U.S. high school students, and U.S. college students, cannot pass a basic U.S. citizenship test.
Less than 3% of all students, college and high school, can pass the citizenship test.
When teachers act in a way that might seem to favor Americans over “illegal aliens,” they might just lose their jobs, as some teachers did.
One complainant stated that the teacher publicly supporting ICE “couldn’t be trusted to work with the children of immigrants.” The children see the powerful social signal when the teacher is replaced by someone more compliant.
- PRO-CRIME – Nothing shows the progressives’ predilection to allow crime for the sake of social justice than how they have reacted to President Trump’s deportation operations.
The actions against ICE are coordinated and well-funded, in part by foreign interests and in part by progressive ones. Many of the progressive interests are also NGOs, funded in part or whole by American tax dollars through progressive political “slush funds.”
Signal Chats were exposed that show coordination between anti-ICE activists and Minnesota state officials.
Minnesota’s Attorney General, Keith Ellison, was directly connected to the chat. His office created a secret portal for the anti-ICE activists to use to coordinate their attacks and get information that was used to attack American independent reporters like Cam Higby.
It should be noted the activity began shortly after the Somali Fraud scam was exposed by another independent journalist whose private and public actions were tracked with the help of Ellison’s secret web portal, Nick Shirley.
In addition to anti-ICE interference campaigns strategically executed by well-trained and funded activists, progressives with political power are wielding it to not only make it difficult for ICE agents to conduct their operations but also to criminally charge them.
If you’re an undocumented foreign national, the Governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, and the Mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, will have a hard time handing you over to ICE even if you’ve committed murder. Both men protected accused murderers from ICE prosecution, with another progressive official all but blaming one of the victims of one of those alleged murderers.
Even when the illegal alien being detained is a pedophile, progressives will still help him escape, as anti-ICE activists did when ICE agents attempted to detain child predator Walter Roberto Vides-Ortez.
- FOREIGN FAVOR – The Anti-ICE actions by progressives, both the government officials and the activists, show a pattern of favoring the foreigner over the American that can be crystalized in a recent public conversation at the Munich Security Conference by alleged 2028 Presidential hopeful, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
She said, at one point, “Our alliance can be built on, values of democracy and respect for international law.”
She told German students that western culture is “thin” and emphasized the rise of the “global south,” which seems to be her source for value. This is a problem when you are elected to constitutionally serve a “western” nation, not a “global south” one.
More tellingly was this comment in which she seems to imply American whites are no real people at all. She told the students, “There’s a very big difference between whiteness and national like your actual culture, right? Whiteness is an imaginary thing. Being German is real. Being Italian is real. You know, being English, these are rich cultural heritages that are based on values, and they are so much a part of what make our, our cultures and our societies what they are.”
This is also what makes Americans uniquely American, including American “whites.” This is a fact we doubt AOC can afford to face, let alone declare.
She followed this up by launching an “all-Spanish” campaign to compel the government to pay for daycare for illegal immigrant children. She launched that campaign with progressive NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
On CNN, an exchange between the host and progressive Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen revealed the progressive mindset in action. In that exchange, you will hear an elected American Senator practically repeat IRGC talking points while American soldiers are at war with that same enemy, engaged in an operation that has already cost them lies. The host asked, “So you believe the Iranian officials over the president of the United States?”
To this, he responded, “I believe that based on all the information that‘s available and Donald Trump‘s track record of lying, including the big lie, which he told the American people during the campaign, that he was going to keep us out of war in the Middle East. He broke that promise. He lied about Iran being an imminent threat… And yes, we know he‘s lying when he says that the Iranians are talking with us and they‘re about to give Donald Trump everything he wants. Yes, that’s a lie.”
It does appear the President was right when he claimed to be talking to Iranian officials as a ceasefire has been agreed to by these same officials.
The progressives’ Texas Senate candidate James Talarico made it crystal clear he favors foreigners over Americans, telling potential voters, “Before I was a politician, I was a public-school teacher in San Antonio, Texas, on the west side of the city, and I taught a lot of undocumented students, and those students tended to be my most patriotic students. They understood something about this country that a lot of us who are native-born forget: that this is supposed to be the land of opportunity.”
Not only do progressives favor illegal immigrants, but they also seem to favor Chinse Communists. The Mayor of Arcadia, CA, Eileen Wang, is a naturalized U.S. citizen from China, whose fiancé was recently convicted of being a CCP spy. The fiancé is a green card holder named Yaoning “Mike” Sun; he is a known member of the CCP.
So far, Wang has refused to resign. This type of CCP activity is only a small part of the rising evidence of widespread CCP influence across both political parties, but significantly more substantively among progressives, their natural “allies.”
CURRENT SITUATION
- DEFUND ICE – Progressives continue to refuse to fund the DHS. The effort is intended to end President Trump’s deportation operations by defunding the whole Department of Homeland Security (no matter the cost to security and American travel). So far, the President has found some workarounds, but cracks are showing, and security risks are emerging.
- PROJECT 2029 – The progressives have produced an answer to Project 2025, a conservative policy wish list presented within American constitutional standards. Their answer is Project 2029, which mostly appears to be a promise to arrest everyone who opposed progressives during the Trump years.
The whole “project” was unofficially kicked off by progressive policy wonk Susan Rice, who served in the Biden administration.
She threatened corporate leaders that complied with President Trump’s executive orders, saying, “When it comes to the elites, you know, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media … it’s not going to end well for them, for those that decided that they would act in their perceived very narrow self-interest, which I would underscore, is very short-term self-interest, and, you know, take a knee to Trump.”
Shri Thanedar (D), a naturalized citizen now serving as a U.S. House representative, recently threatened a Trump administration official for daring to follow constitutional orders, claiming, “You better hope you get pardoned because you will be held accountable for the absolute disregard of the law your agencies have shown over the past year.”
The progressive minority House Leader Hakeem Jeffries echoed the de facto “Project 2029” agenda, stating, “One thing to understand as people who are flirting with the Trump administration, or doing the bidding of the Trump administration, or engaging in the pay-to-play schemes of the Trump administration: The statute of limitations is five years. Donald Trump and this toxic administration will be long gone, but there will still be accountability to be had.”
Project 2029 is not a formal policy wish list, for it primarily has only one policy: prosecute dissent.
- VA INSURRECTION – The state of Virginia seemed to overwhelmingly vote for violence in politics by electing a governor who wouldn’t condemn it. as well as the highest law man in the land, who also openly advocated for it.
Abigaile Spanberger’s refusal to condemn her fellow party member, Jay Jones, for texting he wanted to murder his republican opponents’ kids in front of him matches the current spirit of progressives in general.
Virginia’s newly elected Governor and Attorney General have now seemingly openly advocated for terrorism.
From our January 13, 2026, Final Thought, “The New Blue Fortress, Virginia”:
Here are some of their worst proposed bills this year (so far):
Softening sentencing rules for robbers.
Eliminate ballot hand-counting to assure easier election fraud.
Ban gas-powered leaf blowers.
Free Education for Illegal Aliens
Ban Arresting Illegal Aliens in courthouses
Add 4.3% Delivery Tax affecting all deliveries, including Amazon, Uber, and Door Dash.
“Protects” Transgender children from parental resistance
There are numerous new gun control laws proposed, and abortion will be legalized up to the birth of the child.
They have also voted to triple their pay after campaigning on a promise they will make life more affordable for Virginians.
ASSESSMENT
The last three months have seen an increasing number of progressives, from the street fighter to the top politician, openly declaring progressive values in defiance of American ones. It is somewhat difficult to assess if this rise in boldness is borne from a perception that they are winning the people over or if it has risen from a sense of rapidly diminished standing with the people.
We suspect the reality is known by the most powerful progressives, that honest competition in the marketplace of ideas is a catastrophic defeat waiting to happen. They are quadrupling down on their claims of fascism, Nazism, white supremacism, racism and all the rainbow-connected phobias (homophobia, transphobia, etc.).
Whenever and wherever they get power, they move quickly to establish draconian changes to the law that reinforce their progressive values. Virginia is a classic case in point. Their method of gaining power can also be seen in Virginia, where they ran as “moderates” fighting the white supremacist devil that is the GOP.
They promised economic pragmatism that confronts the white devil, but when they gained full power, they quickly abandoned all pragmatism and moved swiftly to recreate Virginia in the progressive nation’s image, not America’s.
The disregard for blowback indicates the leaders may perceive this might be their last chance to fully convert the United States of America to Progressive U.S.
The street fighters, however, seem to believe the certain and confident tones of their troubled leaders. This seems to be the product of manipulated design, intense psyop agit prop that the progressive media has only intensified over these past three months.
The leaders seem desperate to raise violent armies in anticipation of the growing backlash against policies Americans increasingly view as adversarial to their own American self-stewardship potential.
Our observations of social media commentary by street fighter progressives suggests they have MORE confidence the world is with them, not Americans, and that their progressive values are ACTUALLY the REAL American ones.
They seem to have made the full conversion from progressive American to simply progressive, with little to no awareness of how antithetical their values are to Americans. Their values dismantle the very legitimization of authority in America today, the state’s continued demonstrated recognition of the self-stewardship agency of the individual as a boundary on its power.
Such boundaries on state power in Progressive U.S. would be called dog whistles of white supremacism, as they already call them.
PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS
We believe that progressives, whether observationally or heuristically, understand their nation within America has outgrown its womb and must now either formally end the American experiment or be re-absorbed by it (if not fully annihilated).
The November 2026 election prevents them from fully going openly rogue, for there is still “hope” for a soft-power takeover of the republic so long as they perceive they can realistically win.
Short-term, this means more violence from the street fighter wing of the project and some degrees of checks on progressive aggression by the leaders should they perceive that they may win in November.
Should the polls go against them, for whatever reason, expect progressive aggression to increase across the board. From street fighters to progressive judges and state legislatures, progressives will push for action that triggers constitutional crises.
Whatever cause, country, or people challenges American rule of standards, the progressives will lift them up as justification for ending American rule of law.
RECOMMENDATIONS
What the progressives most benefit from is the failure of Americans to form an effective counter to their project. The GOP project has devolved into a rear-guard protector of progressives, as its values continue to nudge further and further away from Americanism and closer and closer to progressivism.
It also helps that the most powerful counter to the progressives, Donald J. Trump, appears to be a man who lacks self-control. His recent easter expletive threatening to annihilate a civilization falls right into the hands of progressives.
Their narrative to the uninitiated is they’re simply the good guys opposing white supremacists, fascists, and psychopaths. They won’t tell you that the cost of being protected from the bad guys is a surrendering of your agency to the party’s preferred “experts.”
Trump himself does a poor job articulating Americanism. He speaks in grand platitudes about America, but never in specifics. Make America GREAT Again is not a policy statement, it’s a general feeling anyone can put any idea into it that they want.
In that, the marketing phrase is very progressive in nature, appealing to emotions in vague ways that can capture broad audiences.
An American slogan might read Restore and Preserve American Rule of Law. Here, we at least have a specific reference, American Rule of Law, that can lead to a specific conversation about what American Rule of Law is. It is easier to put your own imagination into “great” than it is to put it into “American Rule of Law,” for instance.
Trump has some qualities that are good, qualities we’d want an effective American leader to have. One of these is his ability (though it is inconsistent) to see the root of the issue and attack a problem there. He is a Gordian Knot cutter, but one who sees every problem as a Gordian Knot that just needs cut and not patiently untied.
Trump is willing to be hated by most people even though he would be hard-pressed to ever actually experience it. This is a necessary quality to have so long as progressives control the means of socio-cultural production (which they still mostly do). You must have very thick skin to fight the progressive information war machine.
Trump fundamentally believes in the primacy of sovereign nations over a global governance model, which is a key trait for any future American leader to have.
What Trump is missing is self-control. When he emerged on the scene, politics had become incredibly large-language model driven. There were no clear answers or positions, there were only set responses to certain questions that almost every politician answered according to the party they belonged to.
Trump ended that, which is a good thing, but he replaced it with something that might even be worse, rhetorical shock and awe bullying. Americans needed to shake the large-language model discourse out of politics if they ever hoped to bring politicians to account, but they didn’t need a new political reality where f bombs are the surest path to raising your political profile.
We believe the GOP is no longer a viable alternative to the progressive nation, as it mostly exists within it. If we could compel Americans to act, we would encourage them to explore what American rule of law is for themselves and with their family, friends, and neighbors.
Identify Americans in your community and fellowship primarily with them.
We need conversations, public ones, that invite an exploration of American Rule of Law, of what makes us American, so we know what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against.
From this, we need American parties to emerge that are pledged to not offer policies that violate our American Rule of Law standards. That standard is to have state power bounded by the self-stewardship agency power of its citizens.
Most likely, there will be a left party that favors the weak over the strong and a right party that favors merit over social hierarchies. Yet BOTH will offer no threat to the individual’s capacity to be a self-stewarded individual.
Were we President Trump, we would declare an insurrection, then immediately freeze all progressive media assets and sell them to Americans. We would arrest the top leaders of the progressives, charging them with high crimes and misdemeanors, seeking the death penalty in some cases, while offering paths to restoration to the vast majority of progresses willing to surrender their utopian dreams to American rule of law.
We believe this action would not guarantee success, and it could lead to balkanization, but to continue down the path we are at present is simply to allow the progressives more time to build real violence-producing power in this land while they continue to constrict American liberty wherever they control the government (with gun confiscations and hate speech laws at the TOP of their agenda).
There is no reasoning with the progressive in aggregate, though surely some individuals will abandon this project soon enough. The project itself must complete its transformation, from progressive American to pure progressive, or die trying. It’s built into its very DNA, which tells its followers “Silence is violence” and it can actually “end hate.”
There is no peaceful coexistence possible between the fully formed progressive and the American. At the end of the next 5 years (at most) what this land will be will come into being. Will it be Progressive U.S.? Will it be America? Will it be multiple nations? Or will it be something different altogether?
So long as the new term for their new nation fails to emerge, there is great hope their project is about to come to an inglorious end (for now). The minute that new term emerges, we can only hope our American political leaders recognize the threat and act within the full extent of the law to end the threat.
FURTHER RESOURCES:
America Transformed: The Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism – Ronald K Pestritto
American Progressivism: A Reader – Edited by Ronald K. Pestritto and William J. Atto
Progressivism in America; a study of the era from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson – Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. and Arthur Alphonse Ekirch
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