Five Not-So Quick Things: The Green Shoots Which Will Only Get Greener | The American Spectator

Maybe it’s the natural contrarian in me. Or maybe it’s my irrepressible optimism (if you know me, you’ll know that’s sarcasm). Or maybe it’s my budding Christmas spirit, which is building even despite the disturbing lack of decent Christmas movies this year (Hollywood can’t make ANY decent movies. Why would Christmas flicks be any different?). But I’m listening to all these talking heads and assorted doomsayers and Eeyores who can’t stop talking about what a disaster 2026 is going to be, and, well…

I just don’t agree.

I think people will be surprised at how good a year America is about to have.

And you should probably not scoff at it when I offer up such a prognostication. After all, I’m the guy who wrote the Mike Holman novels (find them here on Amazon), and they’re full of so many things which ultimately came true that I’ve been accused of predictive programming, like I was some sort of CIA info operative (and if I’m that, then my check is clearly lost in the mail). (RELATED: You Get (and Deserve) What You Tolerate. That Isn’t Good News for the UK.)

But I don’t need Holman and friends to work this crystal ball. The green shoots are visible if you’re willing to look for them. To wit…

1. The Economy? It’s Getting a Little Better. And That’ll Continue.

This week, it came out that we’re now experiencing five straight quarters of wage growth outpacing inflation, which is something — assuming it continues — that people are going to begin seeing and feeling.

Gasoline is way down pretty much everywhere. I don’t know about you, but I hit the supermarket earlier this week and picked up a full load of groceries, and for the first time in a while, I wasn’t aghast at what it cost — it was still high, but not higher, and that was a notable change. I’m pricing a new TV for the master bedroom, and it’s considerably less than I expected.

New house? New car? OK, fine. Still got a lot of work to do there. (RELATED: A 50-Year Mortgage Is a Financial Narcotic)

Insurance is the killer for a lot of American families. But a year without a hurricane making landfall on the U.S. mainland is going to help drive home insurance rates down a bit, and in several states, car insurance is going down. That’s understandable — getting rid of illegal aliens means getting rid of uninsured drivers. And getting serious about urban crime, if it’s done effectively, means a lot fewer cars get stolen, which is also a big driver of high insurance rates. Controlling our border is a big deal where car theft is involved, too — lots and lots of stolen cars go to Mexico, and the cartels are in that business.

Health insurance is a mess, and it isn’t going to get better. And the Democrats are going to do everything they can to stop any legislation that would fix the problem, other than just to throw more money at Obamacare subsidies. That’s a whole column in itself. (RELATED: Trump’s Pivot Could Make Health Care Affordable Again)

But on Thursday, the White House noted there are real wins out there…

• U.S. exports are up 6 percent over last year — rising to their second-highest value on record — while Inflation-adjusted exports of consumer goods are the largest ever.
  
• The seasonally adjusted trade deficit with China has narrowed to its second-smallest since 2009.
• In the third quarter of 2025, real exports grew by a 4.1 percent annual rate, and imports fell by around 5 percent — adding about 1 percent to real GDP growth.
• As President Trump delivers better terms for American workers, farmers, and manufacturers, November’s deficit was cut by more than half compared to the same month last year, fueled by soaring tariff revenues.

🚨 CNBC: September trade deficit comes in better than expected

“-$52 billion would be the lightest going back to… WOW we’re really going back!… We’re all the way back to June of 2020!” https://t.co/opzmTSCAIk pic.twitter.com/NnU6kQHtCb

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 11, 2025

Here’s another win, and it’s significant. For two reasons. First, it involves housing, and second, you can and should see this as a result of good policy.

Good news for affordability. Renting is now cheaper than owning in the 50 largest metros and down nearly 4% since 2022. https://t.co/AJzzEnD5cA

— Quantus Insights (@QuantusInsights) December 11, 2025

Rents dropping below mortgage costs are a direct result of more than two million illegal aliens going home. There is less competition for housing in America’s cities because Americans aren’t competing with as many foreigners, and that should tell you that the more illegals are sent home, the easier it will be to find a place to live. (RELATED: America Is a Real Country, Not the World’s All-Star Team)

And eventually, the owners of those housing units who can’t rent them for satisfactory rates will look to unload them, which means more available housing stock for purchase.

There are lots and lots of things which can and should be done to make housing more affordable — Steven Crowder actually did a really good podcast not long ago going through a bunch of them — but the most brute-force effective one is simply to take demand off the board by getting rid of the illegals.

You’ll notice there are awfully few poor and working-class Americans screaming about ICE raids, right? One of my favorite scenes from Operation Swamp Sweep here in Louisiana was the one when Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol agent in command, showed up in a convenience store in a black part of New Orleans and was mobbed by the neighborhood folks who were ecstatic about what his task force was doing. The Democrats don’t want you to see this picture…

You aren’t going to see the real economic effects of the mass deportations until next year, but they’re going to be significant and beneficial for the Americans who’ve been struggling most.

I could do a lot more on this, but I’ve got four more things to touch on. Next…

2. The Death of the Climate Change Scam

People are not giving this the weight it deserves, and I’m not sure why.

Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Loyal American Spectator Reader, I know what you’re saying. You’re discounting the climate change thing because to you, it’s been disproven as a grift a long time ago. And I’m with you there.

But remember, in marketing, you’re not selling to yourself, you’re out there hawking product to the great unwashed. And the great unwashed have had the climate change crap forced down their throats for a couple of decades now. (RELATED: The Welcome Demise of Climate Change Catastrophism)

It’s never actually taken with them, but the fact that all of the climate change narratives have utterly crashed has changed things. Even The Hill, which has fanned the climate change narratives with unbridled enthusiasm for practically its entire online existence, is running op-eds declaring that the jig is up…

The gap between alarmist predictions and observed reality is no longer possible to hide. Scientists deliberately misled the public with cherry-picked data, tortured computer models until they produced the “correct” scary result and misrepresented natural weather events as proof of climate change. What masqueraded as “consensus” was nothing more than a cartel of profiteers feeding on public guilt and taxpayer money.

This was not good-faith scientific inquiry but rather a narrative designed to frighten, to control consumer choices and to justify a massive political and economic reorganization. Much of the public, sensing this dishonesty, no longer listens. The authority of the climate “experts” has been damaged, perhaps irrevocably. Their incessant cries of “wolf” failed to produce the climate beast.

The climate cult declared war on the very engines that lifted humanity from hunger and hardship. Its legacy is economic vandalism and moral decay.

But the spell is breaking, and what’s emerging from the rubble is not despair, but liberation — a long-awaited return of reason to a world held hostage by fear.

There are all kinds of factors to this. Obviously, Trump calling it out as a scam was a big one. That we had zero hurricanes this year, after years and years of the alarmists guaranteeing us that more and stronger hurricanes were a necessary consequence of global warming, didn’t help their cause. The skyrocketing price of energy in Western countries, something that in America is exacerbated by the necessity of more electricity to power data centers the AI revolution will require, has severed the climate change crowd from the Big Tech overlords who’ve been on their side, and that’s consequential. (RELATED: Has the Left Moved on From Climate Change?)

OK, fine, you say. Climate change alarmism is melting away. So what? Why does that matter?

Well, it’s one less thing standing in the way of economic growth. For several reasons, but perhaps most importantly, you’ll see fewer stupid decisions being made based on net-zero or other faux environmental rationales. (RELATED: Bill Gates Has Discovered Something More Profitable Than the Climate Apocalypse)

When people are unfettered to make smart decisions, they’ll make smarter decisions. That means more efficiency, more growth, more progress. That means less money wasted making EVs, which means more availability of cars people actually want to buy, which means people getting hired at car plants and cars being available at more affordable prices. (RELATED: Celebrating the End of EVs)

And so on.

That this is happening now, or beginning to happen, means you could start seeing real results by the second half of 2026.

And the Democrats will have a messaging problem: do you try to revive the climate change thing, knowing that ordinary Americans are going to hate it, or do you abandon it and demoralize the Trader Joe’s Parking Lot Feminists with their Think Globally, Act Locally bumper stickers on their Subarus who make up the hardest core of their base?

Remember — since Barack Obama and his gang took over that party, their electoral strategy hasn’t been attempting to seize the center. It’s been to turn out more of their radicals and hard-core ideologues than the GOP can. So when you say the obvious answer is to dump the climate change stuff, you aren’t wrong as a function of practical politics, but for them, it isn’t that simple. (RELATED: Feminism, the Nose-Ring Theory, and Our Potential Extinction)

And when you recognize that climate change nuttery has been up there at the top of the Democrats’ list of political sacraments like abortion, anti-white racism, LGBTQ supremacism, and open borders, it’s not so easy to move on from it without paying a price in turnout. The people who’ve spent a lot more than 12 years believing planetary collapse was but 12 years away aren’t going to ignore such a betrayal.

Especially when the rest of us are healthier, wealthier, and laughing at them.

3. Get Ready for the YUGE Foreign Policy Wins

No, I’m not talking about Ukraine. Eventually, that war will end — it might well end before the election in 2026 — but at this point, the number of Americans who care about Ukraine anymore is basically minimal. You might notice that your Facebook friends on the Left quietly took their blue-and-yellow profile-pic filters down, and the fact that the Trump administration is engaged in diplomacy in trying to end that conflict makes it a lot less of a political football.

Ukraine pales in comparison to two things that are almost certain to happen in 2026.

The first is that the Iranian regime is going to collapse.

Yes, people have been saying this for a long time. I get that. It’s been 46 years since the Twelver Shi’a lunatics took power in Tehran, and the world has been waiting for them to fall apart ever since. (RELATED: Iran Is Not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya)

But while the Iranians have spent half a century trying to punch above their weight as the military and political superpower of the Middle East, they’ve not done such a fantastic job at the basics.

You’re aware of the fact that the entire city of Tehran is about to run out of water, and the regime is now talking about having to move the capital away, right? Yeah, that’s happening.

You can’t evacuate a capital city of 15 million people without massive civil unrest. Where are those people going to go? They’re going to destabilize their destinations.

Not to mention that this situation is going to call into question all that money the Iranians spent bankrolling Hamas and Hezbollah and a stupid missile and nuclear program, which the U.S. and Israel pretty much turned into smithereens this year. That cash probably could have been used a little better on desalination plants and pipelines from the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea, dontcha think?

There is an enormous amount of activity among the Iranian expat community now in an effort toward making a plan for a new, peaceful, and secular Iran. When the theocratic revolution fully collapses there — let’s face it, when Allah won’t send enough rain to raise the crops or wash Ali’s feet, it starts to look like Allah isn’t as happy with the ayatollahs as they say he is — those discussions will start to look a lot more consequential.

Iran’s collapse doesn’t even require U.S. participation. It’s going to happen because of those empty reservoirs. Hungry people are angry people. Thirsty people go crazy, fast.

In Venezuela, though, we will need to do something. I’ve got a couple of links from RVIVR — one which is a piece of mine, the other is by Trent Kubasiak from RealClear — talking about the justification and necessity to take down the Maduro regime by force if necessary. (RELATED: We Should Declare War on the Cancerous Cartel in Caracas)

Iran going down will be a big prestige boost for the Trump administration and a nice morale hit for the average American — and particularly everybody Gen X and above who remembers the hostage crisis and is still pissed off about it. Images of happy, free Iranians waving U.S. flags, mobbing the C-130s at the airport as they offload pallets and pallets of bottled water after the regime collapses will make Democrats look like morons.

But Venezuela turning over will be a lot bigger deal than that.

Venezuela turning over will have an interesting and quite likely consequential effect on our election results. I’ll just leave it at that.

It’ll also have an effect on crime in our cities. Additionally, you’ll see a lot of self-deportations as Venezuelans return home.

We used to do a lot of trade with Venezuela when it was a free country. That’s over now. Returning it to status as a market democracy will likely bring some of that trade back, though how soon we see it is a question.

But most of all, while the Democrats might look like idiots when Iran’s regime is toppled, when Maduro goes, they’ll look like… something else.

And I’m going to just let that be for now.

4. Hollywood and Big Media’s Collapse Will Matter Next Year

Everybody talks about how there’s nothing on TV, and the movie industry is basically done. The record industry is done. Kamala Harris’s campaign last year wasted millions of dollars trying to enlist celebrities to throw their star power behind her, and that failed.

And if you’re paying attention, you’re noticing that Big Media is collapsing (just like I talked about in Blockbusters — available on Amazon — which you should buy dozens of copies of and give them to all your friends for Christmas, but anyway). I’d said that Skydance’s takeover of Paramount was the most entertaining corporate saga of the modern age, but it might be that the takeover fight in which Skydance, Paramount, and Netflix are at war over Warner Bros. Discovery is even better. (RELATED: Netflix Doesn’t Want Competition — It Wants Narrative Control)

Why do you care about that? Well, consider the caterwauling at CBS News over Bari Weiss’s burgeoning dominion there. That’s a direct consequence of David and Larry Ellison taking over one of the old three major broadcast networks, and they can all see what’s coming. (RELATED: The New Editor-in-Chief of CBS News Is Not Like the Others)

Weiss isn’t even a conservative. Far from it. But she isn’t a Marxist propagandist, and she now runs CBS News — and has an axe to grind against the Marxist propagandists who ran her out of legacy corporate media.

Bear in mind that both CNN and MSNBC — excuse me, MSNOW — have been set adrift by Big Media. Warner Bros. Discovery dumped CNN on its Discovery Global Networks spinoff, and MSNOW is part of something called Versant after Comcast jettisoned it. The legacy corporate TV news business was always a loss leader for the entertainment companies that controlled major media in this country, but those companies don’t make much money on their crappy entertainment product anymore, and now they’re getting eaten by others.

If Skydance gets Warner Bros., they’re going to control more of American entertainment than Disney does. And Skydance is not woke. At all.

This is going to matter because it will affect what’s on TV and what’s at the theater, and it’ll also affect what’s on the news.

So, your assumption that the slimeballs in the media will report this thing and that thing in a way that will kill Republicans politically? Don’t be so sure it’ll stay that way nine months or a year from now.

5. Primary Season Is Going To Be Lit

This far out from a midterm election, you get an inordinate amount of pontification based on macro trends. But the thing to understand is that we know who very few of the candidates will be.

In the past, that’s been sort of a mixed bag. Frequent readers of this column know that I’ve been howling about the sabotage Mitch McConnell has done to conservative Senate candidates in GOP primaries pretty much as long as I’ve been writing in this space, and the political corpses lie just about everywhere.

But McConnell is a political corpse himself. He’s done after next fall. And his influence on, say, the NRSC is waning rapidly.

I am not here to tell you the NRSC has become a positive force for the conservative movement. Just a month or so ago, I had some 20-something cub operative from that organization email me attempting to spread dirt on Blake Miguez, one of the more MAGA candidates running to unseat establishment hack Bill Cassidy in Louisiana’s GOP primary, and it was all I could do not to publish that email at The Hayride. I didn’t, because if I had, I would have blown up the poor girl’s career without getting at whoever put her up to the hijinks she was attempting.

Except here are all of these people saying that it was the NRSC that was responsible for baiting Jasmine Crockett into the Texas Senate race and scaring off Collin Allred and the other Democrats who could actually win. Even Matt Gaetz is saying it.

“[Jasmine] Crockett for Senate is a total Republican op. It is a BRILLIANT Republican op. Here’s why:”

Matt Gaetz discusses the Jasmine Crockett for Senate op in Texas with @PearsonSharp on a new ‘Anchormen Show”.

Catch live at 7pm Eastern/4pm Pacific: https://t.co/UYoOIw87IY pic.twitter.com/8wFVGcnTfb

— Former Congressman Matt Gaetz (@FmrRepMattGaetz) December 11, 2025

I had this in my last column, referencing a RedState story by Teri Christoph, and I was dubious about it. But since then, I’ve had people in the know who aren’t establishment GOP fans contact me and tell me it’s real. (RELATED: Did Jasmine Crockett Take Republicans’ Bait?)

If the NRSC is going to spend the primary season sabotaging Democrats rather than conservative Republicans — even if it’s only some of the time, rather than 100 percent of the time like it used to be when McConnell ran that organization with an iron hand — this will be different.

And Trump has almost literally nothing to do other than to go to war against RINOs who have held back his agenda. He isn’t running again, and while they might want to make him a lame duck, he’s got a lot more juice left in him than they do.

As the idiot Republican state senators in Indiana who literally gave away two congressional seats on Thursday are likely to find out.

We don’t know who the candidates are going to be, that’s what I’m saying. You might assume an angry public is going to turn on the Republicans in charge of the House and Senate, but how do you know that’s going to manifest itself in the general election? What’s just as likely is that the Cassidys and John Cornyns of the world get taken out by GOP primary voters long before the Democrats get to do it, and then it’s somebody fresh, and not hated by his or her own voters, running in the fall.

Against the Jasmine Crocketts that the Democrats can’t stop nominating.

There’s a poll out there showing that voters over 50, who typically play a lot bigger role in midterm elections, are +8 for the GOP this year. That’s a big number.

The 2026 midterms may not be shaping up to be a wipeout for the Democratic Party, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 46 percent of Americans aged 50 and older — who tend to participate more in non-presidential elections than younger voters — said they were planning to vote for the Republican candidate in their congressional district in the midterms. Meanwhile, just 38 percent of U.S. voters aged 50 and up said they intend to vote for a Democratic congressional candidate, according to the survey.

The newly released survey “shows there is still a lot of work ahead for Democrats to unify their base and to demonstrate they can meet the moment,” Joel Payne, a longtime Democratic strategist, told Reuters.

In December 2021, older U.S. voters favored Republicans by 43 percent, compared with 42 percent who viewed Democrats more favorably, Reuters reported. Comparatively, Democrats notched a lead among older Americans during the same month ahead of the 2018 election, 40 percent to 38 percent, according to Reuters.

Again, I’m not making any hard and fast predictions. It’s too damned early for that. What I’m giving you is the green shoots coming through cracks in this conventional wisdom narrative everybody is trying to sell you.

And if the people everybody is most irritated with on the Republican side end up getting blown out of the GOP primary, are you so sure the party loses that seat in November?

Especially after what could be a very good year next year?

Don’t prejudge it. Let it play out some. You might be pleasantly surprised.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

Did Jasmine Crockett Take Republicans’ Bait?

Are They Illegal? Because If They’re Illegal, That’s Why They’re Getting Arrested

Five Quick Things: Traitors, Traitors Everywhere