Saturday Class - It's Being Built, Baby, Built!

Every week, Promethean Action holds a Saturday Class — a deep dive into the ideas, history, and strategic thinking that the mainstream won’t touch.

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The American economy is being rebuilt — physically, factory by factory. The data is overwhelming. The lame-stream media won’t show it to you.

Are you being gaslighted? Is your neighbor being black-pilled?

In this week’s Saturday Class, Brian Lantz — author of Rebuild the USA: The Trump Presidency and Beyond and publisher of the Physical Economics Substack — walks through what is actually happening on the factory floor of the American economy. The picture, in his words: “It’s being built, baby, built.”

Promethean Action activists are taking this message to Capitol Hill this week with a new pamphlet — The American System Is Back, Bye-Bye Globalism.

Below is the case Brian made on Saturday: a tour of real numbers — durable goods, industrial production, machine tools, steel, energy — that prove the American System is moving again.

Real growth — not Biden’s monetary mirage

Durable goods orders in the United States were up 8.2% in 2025. Industrial production has been rising consistently since President Trump took office in January 2025. Manufacturing construction starts are up 20.2% over the last 12 months. Construction starts of electric-power utility facilities are up 68.6% in a single year.

This is the opposite of the Biden-era “growth.” That bump in 2021–2022 was the printing press: cash pumped into the system to fund the Green New Deal — solar, wind, ethanol — capacity that produced inflation, not industrial power. As Federal Reserve nominee Kevin Warsh and President Trump have both made clear, that wasn’t growth. It was a burn pit.

What we are seeing now is real expansion of the physical economy. The S&P Global Manufacturing PMI hit 52.3 in March — the eighth consecutive month of growth. Goods-producing employment added 43,000 jobs in March; construction added 26,000. The Association of General Contractors reports their members would hire even more if workers were available. Wages for production and non-supervisory employees are up roughly $1.40 per hour over recent months — about $3,000 a year, before overtime, with the One Big Beautiful Bill’s no-tax-on-overtime now in force.

The tariffs are working — and they aren’t going away

Between Liberation Day on April 2, 2025 and February 2026, the U.S. goods trade deficit fell 24%. The deficit with China is down 32%. With the European Union, it’s down nearly 40%. Tariffs have generated a 4.9% increase in federal receipts.

And they aren’t going away. People get nagged about this — your neighbor gets nagged about this. The Section 232 tariffs (1962 Trade Expansion Act) on steel, copper, and aluminum, the Section 301 and 122 tariffs (1974 Trade Act), and now the expansion of 232 to derivative products — products that contain steel, copper, or aluminum content — replace the IEEPA-based tariffs the Supreme Court overturned. Tariffs have been a feature of the American System since Hamilton and Washington. They’re continuing.

The result on the ground:

The United States is now the third-largest steel-producing nation in the world — we just passed Japan.
4 million tons of new crude steel-making capacity is expected to come online in the next two years across West Virginia, Arkansas, and South Carolina.
Century Aluminum, in joint venture with Emirates Global Aluminum, is building the first new U.S. aluminum smelter in decades — in Oklahoma.
Highland Copper, Ivanhoe Electric, Rio Tinto, and Wayland are expanding copper mining, smelting, and fabrication.

Machine tools, robotics, and physical AI

Machine tools — the machines that make the machines — are the heartbeat of any real industrial economy. Machine tool orders were up 22.5% in 2025. January 2026 orders ran 24.4% above the prior year. Cutting tools — drills, milling cutters, carbide-tipped inserts that get consumed by the machine tools as they work — are up 11.3% so far in 2026. That is a real-time gauge of physical production, and it is climbing.

On top of that, the Trump administration’s Genesis Mission — launched by executive order in November 2025 and led by the Department of Energy — is driving the merger of advanced CNC machine tools, robotics, and AI on the factory floor. Brian calls this physical AI: fenced-in, application-specific, machinist-supervised — AI as a tool of human creativity, not its replacement. Lyndon LaRouche made the machine-tool principle the center of his economic theory; the Trump administration is now building the policy and capital to deploy it at scale.

Where the workforce comes from

The single most important question for an industrial economy is: where do the skilled workers come from? National Apprenticeship Week runs April 26 – May 2. It is one piece of a much larger reality:

Enrollment in vocational two-year community college programs is up 11.7% since spring 2024. Trade-focused institutions are up nearly 20% since spring 2020.
The number of 18- to 20-year-olds earning associate degrees has jumped 50% — many of them with certificates in the trades.
The U.S. armed services — meeting recruitment quotas in record time — train enlisted men and women in the trades, mechanics, nursing, and the technical skills our industrial economy needs.

There is also a new demographic reality. Roughly 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the country, which has dramatically lowered the “break-even” employment number — the new jobs needed each month to absorb labor force growth. The Dallas Fed now estimates that break-even rate fell from a peak of 250,000 jobs per month in 2023 to near zero today. Lower-pressure labor markets, rising wages, and an economy that can grow families and stable neighborhoods rather than rents and remittances.

Energy unleashed — and the nuclear renaissance

Last week the White House issued five Presidential Determinations directing the Department of Energy, under the Defense Production Act of 1950, to deploy every tool the federal government has to expand oil, natural gas, coal, and large-scale energy projects. The National Energy Dominance Council — chaired by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright — will run the operation.

On nuclear, the dam has broken:

On April 14, the White House established the National Initiative for American Space Nuclear Power — reactors in orbit by 2028, on the Moon by 2030.
The Air Force has selected Buckley AFB (Colorado) and Malmstrom AFB (Montana) for its first base micro-reactors.
New Jersey lifted its de facto nuclear moratorium on April 8.
California’s Diablo Canyon received a 20-year operational extension from the NRC on April 2.
Michigan’s Palisades plant is moving toward restart.
In Tennessee, Oak Ridge and the Tennessee Valley Authority are pushing forward — Kairos Power broke ground on April 17, and GE-Hitachi’s BWRX-300 is being built at the Clinch River site.

On March 31, all six New England governors — Republican and Democrat — issued a joint statement calling for a regional energy strategy built on nuclear power and advanced nuclear technologies. They don’t want to be an energy island. Reality is sinking in.

A renaissance, on schedule

This is the picture of a nation a little over a year into the Trump administration: durable goods up, machine tools up, steel up, factories breaking ground, the trade deficit collapsing, energy unleashed, and an apprenticeship-trained workforce coming online to operate it. Lincoln said that the universe is a mind, and every man is a miner. That work — of human beings using reason to draw new wealth out of nature, for the next generation — is back in motion in America.

Watch the full class — and share the data with the neighbor who keeps telling you nothing is being built.

—Promethean Action Editorial Staff

PS: The 2026 midterms will determine whether President Trump’s agenda survives and accelerates — or gets reversed and crushed.

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