For LAND, SEA & AIR™ US manufacturer of production, custom and OEM mounts for adventurers, commercial OTR fleets, law enforcement, first responders, military vehicles as well as for yachts and fixed wing/rotor aircraft.

I can confirm this. My manufacturing shop is paying 100-300% more for materials. Quote from a machining buddy today: “My material (steel) was 8% of my job last March. It's 23-26% this week. It's making the parts unprofitable.” 90% of US manufacturers are 50 employees or less and don’t buy in bulk, meaning they pay way more than PPI indicates. The academics in DC, who have never ran manufacturing businesses, must look to us in the manufacturing trenches for input to Make America the Manufacturing Superpower of the World again.

Ruling class coming for small manufacturers next. The price of materials needed to manufacture at HISTORIC HIGHS, crushing us on Main Street.

This is great news from @formlabs - and every US manufacturer really. This is the only American owned additive manufacturing company today that has a chance of fighting off the unfolding and scary Chinese threat. They are in fact under assault from knock-offs and counterfeiters. What really separates FormLabs though is the material science and focus on chemistry and consumables. Massive margins for them, but they are reinvesting. Their business hardware is solid (but made overseas), but the materials are the Crown Jewels. Their leadership is incrementally learning how to deliver into the industrial landscape. I cannot think of an American industrial supplier right now that is performing better. They deliver the best print-sift-blast-polish ecosystem and are taking the fight to the legacy and very arrogant German EOS company with this latest machine. Just go and order an SLS system from FormLabs. (@67Designs is only a multi-year SLS @formlabs industrial customer. No ambassador relationship with them, but just want to see them grow and prosper.)

The Entrenched Enemy Within One suspects that the so-called “DC bureaucrats” are not mere functionaries, but a permanent class of career civil servants, batting enthusiastically for the opposing team. They are the malignancy that lodges itself in the body politic of every administration, erecting procedural roadblocks, inventing delays, and simply waiting out the electoral cycle until the next mid-terms arrive to kill off inconvenient programmes. Congress knows precisely who they are. The Administration knows who they are. Yet one wonders whether any advisor has managed to place the full “stonewall list” before the President himself. These careerists are shielded by organised labour, and we can all guess which side that places them on. The cancer is effectively untouchable. When business leaders suspend highly successful careers to serve under President Trump they do so at real personal cost, intending to return to their homes and enterprises across America once their duty is discharged. Not so for the permanent bureaucracy. While these outsiders attempt to impose order, executive discipline, and a modicum of businesslike efficiency on sclerotic agencies, the opposition simply slithers away under the familiar rocks of the District of Columbia. There they wait—eighteen, twenty-four months—fed a constant stream of inside information, conspiring with their colleagues still embedded above ground to thwart every effort at cleaning house, rooting out fraud, waste, and abuse. Those same snakes, operating from the shadows, then leak selective details to a compliant media. Need a tax return on an inconvenient wealthy donor? There is always “a gal for that” in the relevant agency. Wish to strangle a funding deal that might revive rare earth production on American soil? Rest assured, they have “a guy” for that in Agency X. And should you have donated generously to the opposition while your facility bleeds cash in Louisiana? No difficulty whatsoever. A government contract of the Biden vintage for $118 million can be arranged, the slab poured and stops, and the programme quietly established before the term ends—funds to be diverted just long enough to weather the storm until power is restored. In return, of course, ensure that $50 million finds its way back into re-election coffers. One hesitates to be too specific. Yet the scale of corruption and bureaucratic capture in Washington is now off the charts. What is particularly infuriating—and profoundly sad for the nation—is the sabotage of President Trump’s reindustrialisation announcements, many of which were discussed at the 2025 @reindsummit . These initiatives, aimed at restoring strategic manufacturing capacity in critical sectors, face obstruction not merely from ideological opponents but from something more sinister and on full display in the OMB and other DC stovepipe agencies. To any objective observer, the pattern is now unmistakable: these forces do not labour on behalf of the American people. Their loyalties appear to lie elsewhere—on payrolls that ultimately likely trace back, one fears, to the strategic interests of the Chinese Communist Party. The snakes are paid for. This is not governance. It is occupation by stealth. And unless it is confronted with unflinching resolve, the republic will continue to bleed its vital industrial strength while its enemies watch with satisfaction from afar. @JoshuaSteinman @scotttmaier @TommyHicksGOP

This is a good read. @EthanCopple delivers a very clear set of observations about a nitrile glove facility in Virginia and how the Federal money was pulled. What is deeply concerning is the way our Government pulled funding for nitrile glove manufacturing. If DC could do that, then it could easily pull funding for other industries? One that comes to mind as I read Ethan’s work is the 2025 announcements about a $1.4 investment in rare earth magnet production by @VulcanElements. Has the government followed through and actually fully funded funded or was it just ‘reindustrialization theatre’. If not, why not? Equally, if they have, that is awesome and let’s get an update. The big question is — if the US government cannot keep its words and an agency can on a whim decide to pull funding, why on earth should U.S. private capital put up any money?

The ‘graduation’ is not a bit of paper to hang on the wall and insane personal debt of a future ‘Stanford of Manufacturing’ driven by a financial industry who literally “loan-to-own” the student to the grave. No, the graduation for Americans in manufacturing is zero education debt, the means to provide for a traditional committed family earlier and putting savings in the bank, while owning a home and being present as fathers and mothers. We need public-private vocational education infrastructure that could easily be a cornerstone of an Industrial Policy for America. Still waiting for that industrial Policy/Strategy with incentives to invest in industry, not VC-fueled hype. @aphysicist @austinbishop @benkohlmann @jansramek @reindsummit @cpa_tradereform @JohnGardnerVoH @ScrutineerLuca

One of these ‘looking for capitalists’ ads (below) in a paper led to a new market category for a then young architect with an innovative idea. He created a new market, Now in the hands of a second generation the family is operating a multi-billion enterprise that kicks off more cash than most PE funds can dream of. The young man who placed those original ads in the paper in the 1960s secured his funding. It was a rough first 20 years with several near bankruptcies while he perfected the operational model. The original ‘capitalists’ stuck with him. Returns really kicked in long after a VC group would have demanded and engineered a sale so they could clear down their fund. The next generation of the business still has a few of the initial backer’s families as shareholders. They refuse to sell as they keep getting amazing distributions. What is the modern equivalent of the paper ads?

The Madness of the Faceless Accusation Last Friday, a customer service ticket landed on my desk from the team demanding immediate attention. The subject: racism. The complainant chose not to fully disclose her identity, offering instead an oddly anonymous email accompanied by screenshots from an Instagram profile. I recognised the account at once. It belonged to a longstanding customer of 67 Designs—a man who, since 2017, has placed a dozen orders with us. A warrior and veteran. An avid adventurer. A genuine ambassador for the brand, with a link to our site proudly displayed in his bio. A decent man. The demand was simple and brutal: that we fire a veteran — an affiliate and not even an employee — on the basis of alleged racism. No evidence was provided. None. Just the assertion, delivered with the righteous certainty that has become the hallmark of our age. The accuser, hiding behind digital anonymity, sought nothing less than the destruction of a man’s reputation, his livelihood, and his standing in the community. All on the strength of “hurty words” and her professed offence. This is the pathology of our time: the casual, evidence-free allegation of racism deployed as a weapon. It costs businesses time and money. For larger corporations, it triggers the grim theatre of “forensic examination,” the permanent marking of HR files, and the quiet ending of careers and futures. Lives are casually ruined by people who will not even attach their names to their claims. We have seen where this leads. It was precisely this sort of baseless, inflammatory accusation—that a young man was a “racist”—which preceded the horrific death of eighteen-year-old Henry Nowack, who bled out at the feet of police officers even as they read him his rights, while his attacker, the actual perpetrator of violence, played the victim card. I have been unambiguous, over many years and in public, that racism is a stupid and contemptible thing. What is equally stupid, and increasingly dangerous, is the weaponisation of the term by faceless individuals who offer no evidence, seek no truth, and desire only harm through alleged employers. It is a form of moral vandalism, corrosive to trust, decency, and the very possibility of civilised disagreement. Enough. We must refuse to indulge this particular brand of cultural poison. Reputations should not be destroyed on a whim, nor livelihoods sacrificed to anonymous spite. In a free society worth the name, evidence still matters. Character still matters. And the presumption of innocence is not a relic to be discarded whenever someone claims to feel offended.

One of the greatest joys in my life has been founding and owning a manufacturing company. Designing and creating products that young Americans can feel proud of making that have fueled tens of thousands of amazing adventures all around the world. Are they nuclear reactors or parts for ships? No. I set out 13 years ago with a for profit social goal - teach young people “how to fish” and learn skills for life. My selection of products - making the best electronic device mounts money can buy. Here is a young member of our team hand assembling nylon iPad holders for a large Enterprise client. This particular young lady knew nothing about manufacturing when she started. Now she can literally operate every single machine with ease. Her personal growth has been a joy to see — and she is just getting started. The greatest honor is investing in our communities and finding the young people that you can help through sharing knowledge before we ourselves exit stage left.

Well, there goes reindustrialization in the U.S. Do not misunderstand me, getting illegals off the street and deported is 100% correct, but ask yourself who is actually going to do the work until Tesla’s Optimus or a Boston Dynamics humanoid will have the Casting Worker model available that can be priced at <$25,000/pa. Who will fund companies to afford the capital required to automate with humanoids? We are today in a real and so easily predictable bind and there is no cohesive, practical and visionary Industrial Policy surfacing from DC. (Yep, I am banging on about this again). Here is the labor for manufacturing problem in a nutshell: 1. Americans leaving school are preyed upon by a ‘university and loan-to-own finance industry’ to grab every warm body and send them to university to pollute their minds against the virtues and honor of vocational skills and careers. They are crushed by debt most will never afford to pay-off. 2. Our media continues to represent blue collar work as ‘lesser than’ to young people. 3. The available labor pool of 18 year olds is intellectually and practically illiterate from the standpoint of working in any factory — modern or not. They are less educated than prior generations at the same age. They have almost zero chance leaving an urban school of ever having ‘shop’ in school to know about even the most common tools on a production floor sufficient to complete even basic assembly jobs. This includes measuring and counting accurately, recording their time accurately (including subtracting one time from another for duration to put on a traveler), able to use a computer keyboard (swiping flat glass phones, no issue!) or be even baseline trainable. 3. Language differentials between English, Spanish and other languages or dialects are so profound that many in the vocational workforces are increasingly liability for employers and busting any workforce development budget. Training costs are in many cases doubling year over year because in most SMB factories English is refused to be spoken by the workforce. The additional dual (or more) languages is a massive cost and liability headache. Language differences have always been a challenge in American factories as waves of migrants from lower income countries that did not speak English before arriving in America filled the factories. However, the difference today is the fact many openly refuse any kind assimilation and learning English. Many demand American cultural values are brushed aside to accommodate them. 4. In 2026, the liability and ambulance chasing industrial workplace injury law firms (fueled by PE firms) is placing incredible cost burdens on SMB manufacturers like never before. Nobody wants to talk about this, but lawyers fueled by PE money are circling plants owned by PE money and inside the plant workers know the opportunity to get industrial claim payout opportunities to earn a lifetimes income for a small production line self-induced injury. It happens and here is the kicker, it could be a small injury and all the worker’s contingency lawyers need to drive to is an employers failure to deliver second language training to a non-English speaker and a settlement payout will almost certainly result. The lawyers and their PE backers are gaming the system at an unprecedented scale that you better hope you have VC funds to make the settlement a fast no brainer. It is getting baked in in a world many see fraud, waste and abuse accepted everywhere. 5. The system is geared to have (sometimes PE owned and VC funded) manufacturers to seek — of course off the record — illegal or migrant labor that cannot go to lawyers if they get injured and who fear deportation. And who does the selection, front line managers and HR under immense pressure from above to get ‘warm bodies’ on the line to sling a cope and drag or the molten metal. The same in other basic manufacturing industries. In summary, reindustrialization is constrained by labor.

In manufacturing there is always a long-tail for every component and every raw material. Our enemies know this. Few think about the consequences of the pollution in the global supply-chain. Today the FAA has issued a new Service Bulletin (SAIB: HQ-14-16R2) over some of the most basic hardware imaginable - fasteners that are used in every type of aircraft. The defects go back to fasteners "polluting the aerospace industry" supply chain since 2008. I have warned about this for a long time after what I have seen with fastener vendors. The PE firms have in many ways contributed to this with the unrelenting pressure on buyers to source 'globally' to drive down prices to juice their portcos. By the time the issues raisesit's head they would have sold the company to the next greater fool PE firm. The humble fastener - specially a nut that does not meet Military Specifications (MS), Army-Navy Standards (AN), and National Aerospace Standards (NAS) specifications can fail. All now need replacing. The pollution in the fastener supply-chains is getting worse with the Chinese and Taiwanese products (account for >50% of global supply). Their defective non-standard junk is getting into even "trusted" US supplier channels for aerospace, defense, medical etc. Look on the FAA site for details for: SAIB: HQ-14-16R2

Agree. Which is why the west should be doing the base materials too. When I wrote everything, I meant everything