THE DISSIDENT DAD DAILY – Nov. 17th - Vol.2
For fathers who refuse to hand their kids over to the Machine.
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The Latest
1. When Keeping The Lights On Becomes A Luxury
New numbers from The Century Foundation show what every dad paying the utility bill already feels in his bones. Average winter heating costs are expected to hit about $976 this season, up 7.6 percent, after a summer of record cooling costs. Since 2022, average overdue utility balances jumped from $597 to $789. Nearly one in twenty households has debt so bad it is headed to collections. In parts of the South and Appalachia, it is closer to one in twelve. The Century Foundation
This is not “oops, prices are a little high.” This is families skipping meals, running credit cards just to keep the house warm, and staring at shutoff notices while utilities rake in profits and AI data centers hoover up megawatts so kids can be fed more sludge from screens. The experts frame it as an “energy affordability” problem. To me it looks more like a deliberate choice: concentrate control of basic necessities, then act shocked when households drown in debt.
2. Washington’s New Plan: Build You A Box, Keep You Mobile
The Center for American Progress just unveiled a federal housing push with the cutesy slogan “Build, Baby, Build.” Their pitch: Uncle Sam helps drive a big construction boom, which supposedly saves renters around $1,000 a year and trims more than $20,000 off costs for first-time buyers. They point out that about one-third of American households are officially “housing cost burdened,” spending over 30 percent of their income on rent or mortgages. Home prices are up 55 percent since COVID. Rents, 35 percent. The typical first-time buyer is now 40 years old, up from 31 a decade ago. Center for American Progress
So yes, they correctly describe the fire. Then their solution is more centralized control of the hose. Federal incentives, federal standards, federal carrots and sticks to get the “right” kind of units built where planners want them. What never gets discussed is whether families should have to live this way at all. One-third of your income to a landlord forever. Or a 30-year note that chains you to a fragile wage and a fragile country. At some point you stop calling it “the American dream” and start calling it serfdom with stainless appliances.
3. The $1,950 Fantasy Check And The Grant For The Desperate
There is a story bouncing around about a $1,950 “cost of living” payment in 2025. The details are predictably messy. It is not some universal check; it is a patchwork of tax credits and state add-ons, routed through the IRS with strict income thresholds, dependency rules, and paperwork traps. News
Alongside that, there is a $1,900 one-time grant for single parents starting next November. That one targets the people most crushed by child-care and housing costs. Officials sell it as a lifeline. Their own math admits it barely dents the annual bill for childcare, rent, and groceries. rootsofimmoaklee.com
So on one side you have a machine that drives up the cost of life through policy, corporate capture, and monetary chaos. On the other side you have a maze of “relief” programs you can maybe qualify for if you stay poor enough and obedient enough and fill out the forms correctly. This is not generosity. It is control dressed up as compassion.
4. SNAP Tightens The Leash
The USDA just rolled out new work-requirement rules for SNAP, born from something called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Adults roughly 18–54 with no dependents now face stricter work or training mandates: at least 80 hours a month working or in approved programs, or you start ticking down toward losing benefits. Some exemptions are narrowed; the caregiver carve-out is now tied to kids under 14, not older teens. Bay Truck Accessories
The talking point is “self-sufficiency.” In reality, a lot of these adults are in low-wage dead-end jobs, unstable schedules, or regions where actual work is scarce. Bureaucrats in offices will decide whether a man’s scrap-work, family duties, or informal labor “count” as real work. Miss some paperwork, miss some hours, you risk food for the month.
Dads should care about this even if we never touch SNAP. It is another signal of what the regime thinks work is. Not tending land, not raising kids, not building informal networks of care. Work is whatever shows up neatly in their database.
5. The Kids, The Screens, And The “Safety” Experts
Two different stories here, same nervous energy.
First, Education Week reports that 75 percent of teens are using AI companion chatbots. Only about one-third of parents even know it is happening. So Common Sense Media and “Day of AI” swoop in with a new AI “toolkit” for parents: videos, slide decks, conversation scripts, all designed to get mom and dad more “AI literate” and on the same page as the schools. Education Week
Second, a national poll from C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital finds 1 in 6 parents are very or extremely worried about school safety. Their concerns range from bullying and cyberbullying to weapons and shootings. About three in five parents want schools to balance mental-health support with security measures. One in four thinks schools do too little to hold parents accountable when their kids cause problems. National Poll on Children’s Health
Read together, you can feel the pitch coming. Your kid’s social world is on screens. The school is anxious about safety. Tech and mental-health experts step in to manage the whole thing through programs, trainings, toolkits. Parents are expected to stand in the back, nod along, and maybe sign whatever permission slip shows up in their email.
Commentary
The Squeeze Is The Point
Here is the pattern I see across all of this.
Families are being priced out of basic life. Heat. Shelter. Food. Kids’ safety. Even the air between a child and a screen. Every one of those things now comes with a tollbooth, a form, or a professional manager standing between you and your own household.
Utility bills climb three times faster than inflation, and millions fall behind. The official response is to blame “markets” and “monopolies” and then keep the same structure in place, because it serves the right donors. Housing costs trap young families in rentals well into their forties. The think tank solution is to federalize the zoning fight and give Washington more levers over where and how we live.
Then the same system hands out stipends and credits and grants. If you stay poor enough, or file correctly enough, or fit in the right checkbox, you might get $1,950 off your tax bill or a one-time $1,900 bump as a single parent. That money will go straight to the same landlords, utilities, and grocery chains whose prices were inflated by policy in the first place.
That is not accidental. That is a business model.
And when people fall outside the lines, the answer is to tighten the leash. SNAP work rules that treat any informal, local, non-credentialed work as suspect. New hoops, new deadlines, new proofs. You are allowed to be hungry, but not allowed to be unpredictable.
Look at the kids’ side of the story. Tech companies shove AI chatbots into every corner of teen life. Schools scramble, parents panic, and a whole tier of experts appear with “AI literacy” toolkits and safety curricula. Meanwhile, parents who are already exhausted from fighting bills and commutes and fragile jobs are told their role is to attend another Zoom session and “partner with the district.”
What ties it together is not simple incompetence. It is the quiet belief that normal families cannot be trusted to run their own lives. That budgets, housing, food, education, even children’s inner worlds, all belong inside managed systems.
If you are a dad trying to build something sturdier than that, you will feel crazy some days. You will look around and think, “Why is every basic thing harder than it was for my grandparents?”
Because the squeeze is the point. A squeezed man has no time to think deeply, pray, read, or plan. A squeezed mom has no margin to stay home, to homeschool, to push back against nonsense at the pediatrician or the school board. Squeezed kids get raised by screens and policy documents instead of their own blood.
So what do we do with that?
First, stop waiting for the system that profits from your exhaustion to fix it. It will not. Second, shrink your dependence where you can. Less debt. Less subscription life. Lower fixed costs, even if it means less status. Learn basic skills that remove middlemen: heat, food, schooling, community.
Third, and this is the big one, build real relationships with other families who see the same thing. You cannot out-earn this machine on your own. But a small group of committed families can build parallel structures that blunt its impact. Shared childcare, shared meals, shared learning, shared land.
The regime wants you floating, anxious, and grateful for scraps. The dissident move is to become rooted, calm, and very hard to move. The headlines just remind us why that work matters.
Thanks for reading and God Bless,
Greg @ The Dissident Dad
It's interesting how you connect utility costs to deliberate controle, that AI energy consumption bit highlights complex issues we must solve.