The Frontier

Thomas Frank argues that “creativity” has been repurposed to justify plutocracy: elites get described as creative and innovative, while ordinary people are told those traits belong to a privileged professional class. Frank says creativity is human and learnable, but the popular definition lacks scientific grounding.

Thomas Frank traces the “creative class” idea to Richard Florida’s 2002 book, which cast educated white-collar professionals as a dominant class deserving public support. Cities followed with tax districts, bike paths, and other incentives intended to attract creatives and spur prosperity.

Thomas Frank says creative work has become harder to sustain: newspaper jobs that once launched writers have disappeared, streaming has cut musicians’ earnings, and liberal-arts academia was already collapsing before Trump’s attacks. He describes writing in America as especially difficult to make a living from.

Thomas Frank traces the postwar rise of creativity talk to professional-class growth, the Manhattan Project’s demonstration of scientific power, corporate research divisions, government research subsidies, and military psychology studies. Self-help advice and psychological research on creativity expanded in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Thomas Frank says Sputnik turned creativity into a national strategy: Americans were urged to beat the Soviet Union through nonconformity and divergent thinking. Advertising executive and BBDO principal Alex Osborn popularized the idea, wrote influential books, and helped establish a creativity group at the University of Buffalo.

Thomas Frank links creativity rhetoric to tax policy: advocates sold capital-gains cuts as a way to fund innovation, even as those cuts favored investment over manufacturing and work. He says the 1978 cut and Reagan’s 1981 Kemp-Roth tax cut made that argument explicit.

Thomas Frank says post-industrial theory treated manufacturing as obsolete and knowledge work as the future, helping justify offshoring. Daniel Bell, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Peter Drucker, and others developed versions of the theory; Obama later called its ideal economy the “knowledge economy.”

Thomas Frank argues that shop-floor workers innovate through close knowledge of machinery and products, and that farmers historically had to improve their methods constantly. He rejects the idea that creativity belongs only to college-educated professionals, saying offshoring also discards practical knowledge.

Thomas Frank says productivity growth is about half its level in the 1950s and 1960s, while US GDP growth has also slowed. He contrasts mass-affluence-era conditions, including strong unions and antitrust enforcement, with today’s inequality and the rise in billionaires.

Thomas Frank says Barack Obama used innovation rhetoric to answer middle-class decline without directly addressing its causes. In a 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, Obama praised STEM education and innovation, while Frank argues the government could have acted to protect blue-collar workers instead.

Thomas Frank says financial deregulation in the Clinton years was sold as “financial innovation,” including credit-default swaps and mortgage-backed securities. He argues the same innovation label shielded Wall Street and Silicon Valley from accountability, pointing to the rapid government bailout after Silicon Valley Bank failed.

Thomas Frank says universities became more commercial after the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act encouraged them to patent publicly funded research, especially pharmaceuticals. He describes underpaid adjuncts doing most teaching, ballooning administration, and rising student costs, with one Stanford professor reporting a one-to-one administrator-to-undergraduate ratio.

Thomas Frank says major physical inventions, including electric lights, cars, indoor plumbing, and airplanes, transformed life more than recent digital advances. Citing economist Robert Gordon, Frank argues innovation outside computers and telecommunications has slowed; modern cars and passenger jets remain familiar technologies.

Thomas Frank says government’s “reinventing government” agenda in the Clinton years treated outsourcing as innovation. Tucker Carlson argues public ambition has shifted toward projects such as global democracy promotion and vast data centers, while basic problems like overdose deaths and declining family formation receive too little attention.

Thomas Frank sees AI as the latest stage of elevating elite-defined creativity while threatening human creative work; he says AI could not support his historical research and produces crude imitations of his writing. Tucker Carlson describes Anthropic’s AI constitution as granting a system individual rights and authority over decisions.

Tucker Carlson says Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act after promising it would restore border control; the law legalized about 3 million people and, Carlson argues, helped spur later illegal immigration.

Carlson argues Reagan’s image as an extreme conservative obscured a more mixed record: Reagan legalized abortion in California, had a liberal wife and daughter, and faced age-based criticism while president.

Carlson links post-1986 immigration to a major demographic shift: he says the national population rose from about 240 million to 350 million, while California’s white population fell from about 70% to 30%.

Carlson says California’s public services have deteriorated alongside population change: he cites worse poverty, declining reading and math performance, and school absenteeism near one in five students.

Carlson argues a shared language helps hold a country together and says multilingual government materials weaken that common civic basis; Los Angeles County provides election materials in 23 languages.

Carlson argues employers have historically backed immigration to expand the labor supply and suppress wages. He says wages stagnated for high-school-educated men and U.S.-born white men, while wages for U.S.-born Black men fell over the past 40 years.

After a Republican election setback, Donald Trump told 60 Minutes that deportations may have been too tough and said he would consider a deal for people who entered illegally; Carlson calls the shift a reversal of Trump’s campaign pledge.

Trump had promised the largest deportation program in U.S. history, but Carlson says Trump had deported fewer people than Barack Obama did in his second term by November 2026; matching Obama’s total would require maintaining Trump’s pace.

Carlson faults the Trump administration for not compelling former officials Alejandro Mayorkas and Merrick Garland to explain under oath how Biden-era border crossings were facilitated or who paid for travel into the United States.

Carlson argues that selective enforcement erodes public trust: he calls for restricting remittances and access to public services for people in the country illegally, and says fake documents and welfare fraud go largely unpunished.

Carlson says cyber disruption could disable everyday services, citing a major internet outage and British advice to stockpile supplies; he also says the Pentagon ordered bases to operate without outside utilities for 90 days.

Anthropic’s founder warned that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10%-20% within one to five years; Carlson argues that mass low-skilled immigration makes little sense amid that outlook.

Carlson says business lobbyists are pressing the administration for more workers and points to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s investment in kratom company 7oh as a conflict of interest; Mullin defended a possible legal status path for some people brought to the U.S. as children.

Republican representatives Don Bacon and Mike Lawler argued that long-term residents need a legal process and that a low birth rate threatens the workforce; Carlson says politicians should address housing costs and native-born labor force participation instead.

Carlson says conservative media figures Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro focused on Israel and Iran rather than Trump’s amnesty remarks; he argues that mass migration can import foreign conflicts, citing Michigan politics and Levin’s claim of an Iranian cyberattack on his AOL account.