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Our family just returned from an extended holiday in Europe, so it was only a week ago that I learned Lindsay Clancy’s trial was underway in a Massachusetts courtroom. I often avoid the news about trials like this because I don’t want my imagination to venture into the details of such dark and terrible places.

My wife, a mother of three, can’t get enough of the drama. But her interest has little to do with the tragic details of a mother who strangled her children to death before jumping from a second-story window. That’s not to say she, like every other parent out there, isn’t sick with sadness for everyone involved.

Her fascination with this particular tragedy lies in the fact that, with the possible exception of Luigi Mangione, no criminal defendant in America has a more determined fan club than Lindsay Clancy’s.

Why?

It is an unimaginable tragedy. Clancy was clearly struggling with serious mental illness. She repeatedly sought help. She was prescribed a bewildering succession of psychiatric medications. A defense psychiatrist says she was psychotic and heard a voice commanding her to kill her children and herself.

All of that makes Lindsay Clancy sympathetic. But for a growing army of online followers, sympathy apparently isn’t enough. Clancy must be innocent. Or blameless. Or the principal victim of the evening on which she strangled her children to death.

“This is what happens when the sympathetic becomes the pathetic,” my wife said.

She’s right.

The Clancy trial has become a social media obsession. More than 400 supporters, most wearing pink, recently gathered outside the courthouse to demonstrate. Some had traveled from other states. Similar events were organized across the country. Some supporters say they identify with Clancy because of their own experiences with postpartum depression.

Nothing about such identification is pathetic. There is something deeply human about it. What becomes impossible to understand is the leap that follows:

I suffered from postpartum depression. Lindsay suffered from postpartum depression. Therefore, I understand Lindsay. And because I understand Lindsay, Lindsay cannot really be responsible for what Lindsay did.

That isn’t empathy. It’s loose, emotional algebra done without showing the work.

Some corners of the online Clancy universe have gone considerably further. The livestreamed trial has produced what experts call “forensic fandom”: amateur sleuths who believe they have spotted what prosecutors, police, psychiatrists, and apparently everyone else has missed. One conspiracy theory has even suggested that Clancy’s husband killed the children and framed her, despite evidence proving he was at a drugstore during the killings. Now a body double has been suggested to explain this inconvenient detail.

Once you’ve reached the “body-double-at-CVS stage” of empathy, it’s time to close TikTok and take a long walk.

Clancy has become something of a Rorschach test for our age of therapeutic morality, in which understanding why somebody did something increasingly trumps what they did.

Trauma. Addiction. Poverty. Depression. Discrimination. Childhood abuse. Prescription drugs. Social pressures. Systemic failure.

All can be real. All can matter. But the Clancy sympathizers take the logic to an extreme.

Instead of waiting for twelve jurors who have spent weeks hearing evidence to decide whether Clancy met the legal standard for criminal responsibility, thousands of online amateurs who have never examined her have diagnosed her from their couches -- and rendered their verdicts accordingly.

The most revealing feature of the pro-Clancy movement is the identification expressed by women who have experienced anxiety, depression, or postpartum problems: the sense that any of them could have ended up in Clancy’s wheelchair.

But could they?

Millions of women experience postpartum depression. They do not kill their children. Millions of Americans suffer from serious mental illness. They do not kill anyone.

Identifying with someone’s suffering is not the same as identifying with her actions. “That could have been me” is not a psychiatric diagnosis, let alone a legal argument.

People with psychiatric disorders spend their lives making choices, exercising restraint, seeking treatment, protecting their families, and taking responsibility for themselves. Treating them as captives trapped by malfunctioning brains isn’t compassion. It’s condescension.

Indeed, postpartum psychosis is real. People suffering from genuine psychosis can lose contact with reality so completely that our criminal law recognizes they may not be morally or legally responsible for their actions.

If the jury concludes that’s what’s happened here, Clancy should be found not criminally responsible for reasons of mental illness. That’s worth repeating: If the jury concludes.

Not if 400 people gathered outside a courthouse wearing pink conclude it. Not if a TikTok influencer concludes it. Not if someone who once suffered from postpartum depression feels an emotional connection to Clancy and concludes it.

As the case completes closing arguments, the jury’s task is not to decide whether Lindsay Clancy deserves sympathy. Its task is to determine whether she understood what she was doing and that it was wrong. We increasingly treat the two as mutually exclusive: either understand the perpetrator or condemn the act.

We used to be able to do both.

Mercy is one of the better instincts human beings possess. But empathy isn’t supposed to require us to surrender judgment. And understanding someone’s pain does not automatically make the person who inflicted pain the real victim of the story.

That is the point at which the sympathetic becomes the pathetic.

And if sympathy for Lindsay Clancy grows so enormous that three dead children are lost behind it, we haven’t demonstrated how compassionate we are.

We’ve shown that we’ve forgotten what compassion is truly about.

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Most Americans have never heard of Father Charles Coughlin. They should.

For a time, he was arguably the most influential political commentator in America. During the 1930s, roughly one-quarter of the nation’s population tuned in each week to listen to the “Radio Priest.” He was intelligent, charismatic, fearless, and immensely persuasive. Millions admired him for asking questions many believed the political establishment and the press were unwilling to pose.

History now remembers him for a different reason.

As his popularity grew, he increasingly wove banking, politics, the press, Communism, and world events into a single overarching conspiracy, with Jews at the center of his narrative. Eventually, his grand antisemitic conspiracies collapsed under their own weight, culminating in one of the most spectacular disasters in the history of American political commentary. A man who once commanded one of the nation’s largest audiences spent the final decades of his life in total obscurity, remembered for a baseless, conspiratorial worldview that ultimately ruined his reputation.

No historical comparison is perfect, but the trajectory of Candace Owens’s commentary echoes the arc of Coughlin’s career and inevitable ruin.

Like him, Owens has built a large following. Like him, she weaves obscure, disparate events into a single framework in which Israel, Jewish organizations, Jewish donors, and hidden networks of influence become recurring answers to an ever-expanding range of unrelated questions.

Admittedly, comparisons across nearly a century are necessarily imperfect. Coughlin broadcast from a church tower during the Great Depression. Owens, a newly minted Catholic, communicates through podcasts, YouTube, X, and a digital-media operation. Coughlin addressed a radio audience facing economic collapse and world war. Owens operates on social media in a country fractured by institutional distrust. The technology has changed. Human nature has not.

Assuredly, they share the same method: converting suspicion into certainty, coincidence into coordination, and Jews, Israel, or supposedly Jewish-controlled institutions into the connecting tissue linking totally unrelated events.

Coughlin’s initial appeal rested on genuine grievances: concentrated financial power, Wall Street speculation, political corruption, and the suffering of ordinary Americans during the Great Depression. Then his explanations began to shift.

Economic hardship was no longer simply the result of bad policy, market failure, or greed. It became evidence of coordinated financial control. Bankers were no longer merely influential; they operated as a hidden international fraternity. Newspapers no longer merely disagreed with him; they protected the same special interests. Politicians were no longer simply wrong-headed; they served a concealed system.

Eventually, Jews became the unifying explanation for it all. Not one explanation. The explanation. Every criticism proved the conspiracy’s reach. Every newspaper rebuttal demonstrated media control. Every Jewish objection only confirmed for Coughlin that he was on the right track. Contrary evidence never weakened his theories. In his mind, it strengthened them. Coughlin did not merely discover conspiracies. He developed a worldview that required them.

The public did not catch on all at once. His decline came when his rhetoric grew so extreme that Americans increasingly saw a broadcaster determined to make every road lead to the same destination.

That progression is what makes Candace Owens a legitimate comparison. She’s walked the same path. In June 2024, she opened an episode by asking:

“Is America a sovereign nation or are we being controlled by Israel?”

As Owens would explain it, an Israeli blackmail operation was so deep it was controlling American presidents.

Then came the accelerant: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. She told listeners there was “irrefutable proof” that foreign actors were involved in Kirk’s assassination and that the American government “absolutely knows” who was behind it.

In one episode, Owens said of Kirk’s murder: “There’s probably a synagogue of Satan hiding behind it.” Her words supplied a religiously charged image of the unseen Jewish coordination behind the killing. It invoked a hidden collective.

She was no longer questioning official investigations. She was replacing them. She vowed to succeed where law enforcement and the courts could not. The circle kept getting bigger: political donors, Turning Point USA staff, Benjamin Netanyahu, France, Egypt, intelligence officials, and, amazingly, even Erica Kirk, his widow.

She then told the people she was condemning: “Your God is Satan” and “You will continue to kill and sacrifice children.” Here, she entered ancient territory: secret Jewish evil, corrupted religion, ritual depravity, and the sacrifice of children. The stuff of blood libel.

Her opponents were a “billionaire class of Jewish supremacists” using money to silence her. Her criticism became a theory about a people. When “Israel,” “Zionists,” “Jewish donors,” “Jewish supremacists,” “Frankists,” Epstein, Satan, ritual evil, and murdered children repeatedly appear within the same explanatory universe, the audience is being offered more than criticism of a deep state.

It is being offered a perverse worldview.

In Owens’s world, history is no longer shaped by competing interests. Or bureaucratic incompetence. Or ideology. Or coincidence. Or ordinary human ambition. Someone is always pulling the strings. Someone arranged it. Someone covered it up. Someone benefits.

History rendered its verdict on Father Coughlin. His punishment was obscurity. After retiring in 1966, he was heard from only rarely. He lived long enough to see the country move on without him.

Owens’s own evolution fits the same pattern. The greatest danger facing a gifted commentator is not being wrong about something. It is becoming so convinced that a conspiratorial theory explaining everything eventually explains nothing.

When the narrative begins to select the evidence, credibility is the first casualty.

Reputation is the next.

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Political strategists have long insisted that elections are won one voter at a time. The Democratic Party, however, refined the concept, winning elections one demographic at a time.

Every conceivable victimhood identity has become a political constituency for the party. Race. Ethnicity. Religion. Gender. Sexual orientation. Class. Education. Urban voters. Suburban women. Union households. College graduates. Non-college graduates. If a polling firm can identify a group, a consultant can design a social media strategy for it.

Political scientists call it coalition-building; political consultants call it billable hours.

For decades, the strategy worked brilliantly. Whenever electoral math grew difficult, another aggrieved constituency was added to the coalition. Eventually came “intersectionality,” which allowed individuals to belong to multiple constituencies simultaneously. It was the political equivalent of airline miles. Collect enough resentful identities, and you qualify for elite status.

But the strategy eventually hit a wall. What happens when you run out of categories? Once every imaginable oppressed demographic has been sliced, diced, surveyed, micro-targeted, focus-grouped, texted, emailed, and visited by volunteers with clipboards, what remains? The answer is obvious.

Invent another one. That brings us to the newest addition to the Democratic Party coalition.

The CRAZY people.

It’s a sizable constituency. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, roughly one in eighteen American adults (5.6%) experiences a serious mental illness each year. That’s millions of potential voters, candidates, and officeholders.

No campaign worth its polling data would ignore a voting bloc of that size. The recruitment effort is well underway.

Consider the recent televised debate among Maine Democrats to replace Graham Platner, their disgraced Senate nominee. Viewers were introduced to James Webb (a man) who believes he’s Ashley Webb (a woman). When a Democratic candidate insists that objective reality should conform to subjective belief and then demands that everyone else participate in the madness, well . . .

He’s CRAZY.

Then there’s New York’s incoming Representative Darializa Avila Chevalier, who supports abolishing both police departments and prisons. It’s an elegantly circular public policy. No police? No crimes. No crimes, no prisons. The crime rate falls to zero. Take note...

She’s CRAZY.

What’s Minnesota Governor Tim Walz been up to lately? Apparently, he recently pardoned an illegal alien, Tou Lue Vang, after Vang was convicted of repeatedly raping a ten-year-old child. Why the pardon? To prevent ICE from deporting him from the country. Walz excused Vang for having the “worst day” ever. So . . .

He’s CRAZY.

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s next frontier is government-operated supermarkets. If you’ve ever admired the efficiency of the Department of Motor Vehicles, your next thought is naturally, “These people should be in charge of produce.” The same institution that brought you the DMV is now expected to determine whether the avocados are ripe. No doubt . . .

He’s CRAZY.

New York Democratic Socialist leader Gustavo Gordillo, an acolyte of Mamdani, has declared, “We don’t think that anyone should have a constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment.” Translated into plain English, prosperity becomes constitutionally suspect somewhere around ten percent. One begins to suspect the next campaign platform may include federally regulated garage sales. Evidently . . .

He’s CRAZY.

Every political party produces colorful personalities, unconventional candidates, and ideas that sound better in faculty lounges than at family dinner tables. But viewed collectively, something remarkable begins to emerge.

Facts are optional. Biology is negotiable. Economics is aspirational. Public safety is a social construct. Profit is morally problematic. Borders are insensitive. Gravity is under review.

No serious political party would deliberately organize itself around people whose understanding of reality is increasingly untethered from it.

That would be CRAZY.

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History has an odd habit of recycling characters.

Every few decades, America produces a man who captures the nation’s imagination, earns the public’s trust, and then channels that trust into a single, compelling argument.

Charles Lindbergh became that man. Tucker Carlson wants to join him. As “America Firsters,” they make a remarkably instructive comparison.

Lindbergh became America’s greatest living hero the moment the Spirit of St. Louis landed outside Paris nearly a century ago. Schools closed, cities held parades, and presidents sought his counsel. When he spoke, Americans listened not because he was a talented diplomat or brilliant military strategist but because they trusted the man who had flown alone across an ocean.

Years later, he posed the question that divided the nation. Why should America involve itself in another war? It was not an irrational question. The country had buried more than 100,000 young men in the mud of World War I. Europe again appeared determined to settle ancient scores. Americans were understandably reluctant to volunteer for another catastrophe.

Lindbergh saw all of that with remarkable clarity. What he failed to see was Adolf Hitler.

Tucker Carlson, like Lindbergh, asks questions that millions of Americans quietly ask themselves.

Why does Washington seem unable to avoid foreign wars when America has troubles of its own at home? Why are the architects of Iraq and Afghanistan still treated as wise men? Why does every international crisis seem to require American money, American weapons, or American lives?

These are fair questions.

But what Carlson has failed to understand is that some wars do not come looking for America because America invites them. They come because evil eventually reaches every doorstep it can.

Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler. But he has invaded sovereign neighbors, threatened our strongest allies, bombed innocent civilians, poisoned his enemies, and repeatedly declared that the collapse of the Soviet empire was a historic injustice that must be corrected.

Meanwhile, Iran has spent decades financing, arming, and directing organizations openly committed to America’s destruction and to the killing of Jews. Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies do not seek diplomatic concessions. They seek elimination.

Lindbergh’s reputation collapsed when he argued that “the Jewish people” were one of the principal forces pulling America toward war. In that moment, a debate over foreign policy became a debate about Jews themselves.

History has never quite forgiven him.

Carlson has increasingly focused on the influence of pro-Israel organizations, wealthy donors, advocacy groups, and foreign-policy voices on American decision-making. It’s uniquely treacherous ground. The distance between criticizing a pro-Israel lobby and condemning an entire people is far shorter than some realize.

The language of influence, loyalty, and foreign policy carries an unusually heavy historical burden when Jews and our alliance with Israel are involved. Arguments that begin as debates about lobbying or alliances are quickly filtered through older, uglier, and antisemitic accusations that long predate the modern State of Israel.

Public figures are judged not only by what they intend to say but also by the historical memories their words evoke. That’s why the comparison to Lindbergh is valid.

Lindbergh was an aviator. Carlson is a podcaster. Neither first earned the nation’s trust by studying grand strategy. Instead, they earned it by demonstrating courage and smarts in one arena, then transferred that credibility to another.

Lindbergh underestimated Hitler because he became convinced that America’s greatest danger came from those urging intervention.

Carlson is making the same mistake. He has spent years exposing the failures, hypocrisies, and deceptions of Washington’s elite. Much of that criticism has been warranted. But exposing one danger does not eliminate another.

Like Charles Lindbergh before him, he has correctly diagnosed his government’s failures while underestimating the ambitions of those who wish us harm.

History rarely repeats itself. But it often tempts intelligent men into making the same mistake for entirely different reasons. America keeps producing men who understand the cost of war but underestimate the cost of waiting too long to fight a just one.

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The Democratic Party wants power. That’s understandable. Like any political party, it exists to win elections, pass legislation, appoint judges, and shape the country’s direction. Without power, it risks becoming little more than a debating society with better fundraising.

The danger begins when a political party decides that admitting reality is more dangerous than denying it. The temptation is understandable. Admitting uncomfortable truths that are often part of reality can carry an immediate political cost.

For example, asking an obviously aging President Biden, who’s losing his faculties, to step aside risks losing the White House. Or, more recently, vetting a Senate nominee like Graham Platner risks losing a Senate seat just as the party believes it’s on the verge of retaking the majority. Democrats have a way of convincing themselves they have a better option when the truth is confounding.

Delay. Explain. Deflect. Rationalize. Hope. Maybe the polls improve. Maybe voters forget. Maybe our friends in the media do us a solid and move on. Maybe we get lucky, and the next revelation never comes. Maybe gravity takes the week off.

It never does.

With President Biden, Americans watched for years as he spoke haltingly, grew increasingly frail and confused, lost his train of thought, found himself adrift onstage, and struggled in unscripted settings. Poll after poll showed voters’ deep concerns about his age and fitness for another four-year term.

Yet Democratic leaders responded not by confronting those concerns but by dismissing them. The videos of a disoriented Biden were supposedly “cheap fakes.” The concerns were exaggerated. The public was told not to believe its lying eyes.

Then came the presidential debate. Ten minutes in, reality interrupted the script. The American public saw, without interruption, what millions had suspected for months. Reality hadn’t changed. Only the political cost of denying it had.

Successful organizations would have treated that episode as a cautionary tale. Let’s call it a historical “learning experience.”

Unfortunately for Democrats, their party treated it not as a lesson but rather as a rehearsal.

Long before the allegation that ultimately ended Graham Platner’s Senate campaign, warning signs were flashing. A troubling online history resurfaced. An unexplainable Nazi tattoo demanded an explanation. Senior campaign staff departed. Questions mounted about his judgment and temperament. Reports from women alleging abusive behavior and sexual misconduct emerged.

Each controversy was treated individually as manageable. Collectively, they should have raised profound questions about his viability as a candidate.

Instead, prominent Democrats continued to climb aboard the Platner Express. Elizabeth Warren, who looked at Biden in April, 2024 and declared “The man is sharp,” enthusiastically declared “Graham Platner is my kind of man.” Likewise, Ro Khanna deemed Biden “completely mentally sharp” just weeks before the debate debacle. Two years later, noting that Platner’s statements were “misogynistic, shameful and wrong,” he endorsed him anyway.

Bernie Sanders pledged to “do everything I can” to help elect Platner to the United States Senate. Ruben Gallego argued that Platner had “the right to grow out of his stupidity.” Each was convinced that if every revelation could be defended individually, Platner’s campaign would somehow survive.

Then came the allegations of rape.

Within hours, Platner dropped out of the race. The irony is that the very effort to preserve political power by denying reality often destroys it.

Had Democrats addressed concerns about Joe Biden months or years earlier, they might have had time to properly nominate a credible candidate under far less chaotic circumstances.

Had they subjected Graham Platner to the same scrutiny that eager Republican opposition researchers would inevitably apply, they might have chosen a nominee capable of surviving a general election.

In the end, this isn’t really a story about Joe Biden or Graham Platner. It’s a story about a political party that has grown increasingly reluctant to admit unpleasant truths when elections are on the line. Once a party believes reality is negotiable, every inconvenient fact becomes an enemy rather than a warning.

Warnings exist for a reason. They give political parties time to change course. Ignore them long enough, and warnings give way to consequences.

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The United States House of Representatives has long been known as “the People’s House.” Of all the institutions in our federal government, it comes closest to pure representative democracy. Every two years, the people of each congressional district elect one representative to carry their values, priorities, and worldview to Washington. The Framers intended House members to be the closest the federal government has to the public itself.

Of course, members of Congress do not return home and govern their districts according to their own viewpoints. But indulge in a thought experiment.

Let’s imagine that the political positions taken by Darializa Avila Chevalier, New York’s next representative for the 13^th Congressional District, become the operating manual for daily life in her district.

DURING OUR TOUR OF HER DISTRICT, PLEASE KEEP YOUR HANDS AND ANY REMAINING PRIVATE PROPERTY INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES.

OUR TOUR BEGINS NOW.

First Stop: Public Safety

You’ll notice the police station is still standing, but the lights are off. The parking lot is empty. No patrol cars. No cops. No detectives. No correction officers. No probation officers. The district’s estimated 3,200 residents who once worked in law enforcement have all been liberated -- from employment.

According to Avila Chevalier’s public statements and social media posts, she wants to abolish the police and prisons. “We’re gonna defund and abolish” the police, she says. That means “ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all, ever.”

The local NYPD precinct and the courthouse holding cells? Closed. The correction officers? Looking for work elsewhere. The inmates? They’ve entered the exciting new field of unsupervised community outreach. They’re no longer behind bars. Your front door is.

The tour continues.

Second Stop: Immigration

Notice how short the line is at the ICE office. That’s because there isn’t one. It’s “Enforcement and Removal Operations” has removed itself. Customs and Border Protection now specializes in welcoming everyone equally.

The district’s estimated 39,000 illegal residents, 24,000 of whom have lived in the United States for more than 10 years, no longer need to worry about deportation. After all, Avila Chevalier has publicly maintained that “All deportations are wrong. A world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward.”

No borders. No deportations. Problem solved.

Whether someone crossed illegally, overstayed a visa, ignored a removal order, or simply decided that paperwork was an outdated social construct has become largely irrelevant. Federal immigration law still exists, but it has no jurisdiction in this zip code.

Please remain on the bus.

Third Stop: Housing

If you’ve ever wanted to own an apartment building, today is your lucky day. You don’t have to buy one. No one owns them anymore.

The estimated 5,000 to 6,000 landlords from Harlem to Morningside Heights to Fordham to Highbridge have found that private property has become something of a historical reenactment. Avila Chevalier has endorsed the taking of landlord property and “seizing the means of production.”

Many of the former landlords in her district owned exactly one building. Not skyscrapers. Not luxury towers. One building. A six-unit walk-up. A mixed-use building with apartments upstairs and a bodega downstairs. Yesterday, they were small-business owners. Today, they’re exhibits.

The tenants cheer for about three weeks. Then the boiler fails. The elevator stops. The roof leaks. The superintendent has disappeared because no one is paying him. Collective ownership has many admirable aspirations. Emergency plumbing has never been one of them.

Our tour continues.

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Fourth Stop: Small Business

Please watch your step. The economy is under construction.

Actually...it’s under committee review. The district’s approximately 8,000 small businesses have been invited to participate in the exciting new Worker Consensus Initiative. The owner of the neighborhood pizza shop no longer owns the shop. The barber no longer owns the barber chairs. The mechanic no longer owns the garage. The dentist no longer owns the practice. The pharmacist no longer owns the pharmacy.

Everyone owns everything. The roughly 67,000 people employed by these businesses hold a staff meeting.

Agenda Item One: Who ordered the inventory? Nobody.

Agenda Item Two: Who signs the payroll checks? Excellent question.

Agenda Item Three: Lunch. Cancelled. The restaurant collective couldn’t agree on who owns the stove.

Let’s move to our next stop.

Fifth Stop: Dining

About 800 restaurants once employed about 14,000 people in this district. Today, they serve something different.

Economic theory.

The chef would like tomatoes. The purchasing committee is still discussing dialectical materialism. The waiter apologizes. The Revolution is running about forty-five minutes behind. Reservations are no longer accepted. Neither are profits.

Sixth Stop: International Affairs

Our next exhibit features the approximately 40,000 Jewish residents estimated to live in the district.

Some may reasonably wonder whether the repeated antisemitism in Avila Chevalier’s past social media posts reflected youthful excess -- or her authentic worldview. After all, one of her posts answered the question “When will Israel disappear?” with: “Trick question. Israel doesn’t exist.”

That’s an awkward icebreaker at the synagogue.

By the way, the district’s tens of thousands of residents in interracial and interethnic marriages have questions of their own after learning that Avila Chevalier has criticized black and Arab men for “fetishizing ugly colonizer women.” Nothing says “inclusive movement” quite like telling people whom they’re supposed to love.

Final Stop: History

Every communist experiment begins with certainty. Everyone promises that this time will be different. Marx promised liberation. Lenin promised equality. Stalin promised progress. Mao promised renewal. Castro promised justice. Different countries. Different languages. Yet the miserable endings are remarkably similar.

Fortunately, none of this is how the House of Representatives actually works. A freshman member of Congress cannot abolish police departments, nationalize apartment buildings, eliminate private businesses, close jails, abolish borders, or rewrite the Constitution from a Capitol Hill office.

But elections are not merely about power. They are also about judgment. Every vote is an endorsement—not just of a candidate, but of the ideas that candidate has chosen to champion.

As you exit America’s First Congressional Theme Park, we hope you enjoyed your tour. Please remember that every ride was hypothetical. The philosophy behind them was not.

And neither was the election of Darializa Avila Chevalier.

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When California announces or expands a new social benefit, it’s a bold and progressive republic charting a humane future for the nation. That’s what they say here.

When California chooses to ignore federal law and priorities, it is a sovereign state standing up to tyranny. They say that here too.

And as California’s Governor, Gavin Newsom, sues Washington and Trump’s fascist tactics week after week, we’re told it’s defending democracy itself.

But when the bill comes due, California suddenly remembers it is part of the United States. This is federalism, California style. Billions are spent, outcomes are optional, and every failure becomes an argument for expansion.

It’s an elegant arrangement. Sacramento gets the moral glory. Washington gets the invoice. Counties get the paperwork. Contractors, donors, and NGOs get the money. Auditors get the mop.

California is not merely a sanctuary state for illegal immigrants. It’s a sanctuary state from accountability itself, a place where Democratic lawmakers invoke sovereignty when Washington asks questions but invoke union when Washington writes the checks. The state calls it compassion. Examiners and investigators call it something else.

This is why federalism without accountability becomes fiscal cosplay. California dresses up as a sovereign progressive republic until the bill arrives. Then it rediscovers the Union.

The governing style of the state’s Democratic supermajority is not complicated. It’s an 7-step process:

1. Identify as many sympathetic constituencies (a.k.a. “voters”) as possible.

2. Announce an expansive, costly commitment to support them.

3. Wrap it in moral language.

4. Pay for as much of it as possible with federal funds.

5. Resist oversight as an act of cruelty.

6. Blame Washington for any shortfall.

7. Shame Republicans for noticing.

To be clear, helping the poor, the sick, the hungry, the homeless, and the vulnerable is not the scandal. A civilized society should seriously debate how to meet those obligations. The scandal is California’s habit of treating the announcement of help as equivalent to helping.

In Sacramento, spending is the proof of success. Results are optional.

Consider Medi-Cal, California’s version of Medicaid. For years, it has expanded eligibility for illegal immigrants, benefits, coverage, and costs. It is less a safety net now than a fiscal weather system: too large to ignore, too politically sacred to control, and always somehow blamed on conditions elsewhere.

California’s leaders speak about Medi-Cal as if compassion were a funding source. But compassion does not reconcile eligibility files. It does not verify applications. It does not detect fraud. It does not pay doctors, hospitals, or taxpayers back when billions in questionable payments are discovered.

The same lesson applies to food assistance. California’s fraud rate among eligible recipients reveals something important: a system that prioritizes delivering benefits over verifying eligibility. That may sound noble until one remembers that every dollar stolen from the system is a dollar unavailable to someone truly hungry. Waste is not victimless. It simply hides its victims behind accounting categories.

Remember California’s unemployment insurance fiasco during the pandemic? It was a spectacle so grand it deserved its own float in the Tournament of Bureaucratic Failure. Fraudsters feasted. Prison inmates collected benefits. Criminal rings treated the state like an ATM with a diversity statement. Meanwhile, legitimate claimants wandered through the administrative wilderness, hoping to speak to a human being who had not already been replaced by a broken website.

This was not just a pandemic emergency. Emergencies do not create competence or incompetence. They reveal them. California revealed a great deal.

The homelessness crisis may be the most morally exhausting example. The state has spent staggering sums on homelessness and housing programs, yet cannot show what worked, what failed, or where the money went. Only California could spend billions on homelessness and still leave voters asking the most basic question in government: what did we buy?

The answer, apparently, is process. Committees. Grants. Nonprofits. Consultants. Strategic plans. Equity frameworks. Coordinating councils. Dashboard initiatives. Pilot programs. Listening sessions. And beneath every overpass? Dozens of tents.

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High-speed rail deserves its own special place in the Museum of California Self-Regard. It began as a vision of the future and has become a train to nowhere at a speed so slow it can only be described as theoretical. The train is always just beyond the next appropriation, the next lawsuit, the next federal grant, the next revised estimate, the next optimistic rendering of smiling passengers who, at this rate, will have to be played by their grandchildren.

In the private sector, a lack of results gets someone fired. In the California government, it gets someone renewed funding to study why the previous funding did not produce results. This is not a system. It is a piñata for people with grant-writing experience.

California is no longer the future. It’s just a very expensive warning. When Newsom runs for President and claims the state is a model for the nation, the nation has every right to ask whether the model can survive contact with a balance sheet.

Until then, California’s experiment is not enlightened government. It is a sovereign republic of tweets and press releases, a welfare state built on borrowed virtue, and a national laboratory that proves only one thing: the easiest money to waste is money you can pretend belongs to someone else.

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Most of us encountered the riddle as children.

A farmer stands on the bank of a river with a fox, a hen, and a sack of grain. He has a small boat that can carry only himself and one passenger at a time. If he leaves the fox alone with the hen, the fox eats the hen. If he leaves the hen alone with the grain, the grain disappears. The challenge is to get all three safely across the river.

The puzzle has endured for generations. The solution is deceptively simple. Success hinges on one critical assumption: everyone behaves in accordance with their nature. The fox remains a fox. The hen remains a hen. The grain remains lunch.

The farmer’s task is not to hold a peace conference between the fox and the hen. It is merely to accept that some creatures have dietary preferences.

That brings us to President Trump’s emerging vision for the Middle East.

While the details of the administration’s proposed memorandum of understanding with Iran remain largely hidden from public view, one thing has become increasingly clear. As Vice President Vance describes it, the objective is far more ambitious than securing a ceasefire, ending the war, opening the Straits of Hormuz, and ensuring Iran never has a nuclear weapon. The stated goal is nothing less than transforming Iran and the Middle East into a region of unprecedented peace, stability, cooperation, commerce, and prosperity.

It is an admirable aspiration. It is also the most difficult geopolitical undertaking imaginable.

This is so because the Middle Eastern version of the farmer’s puzzle bears little resemblance to the original riddle.

The shore no longer has a fox, a hen, and a sack of grain that must get to the other side of the river.

It includes Iran, Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf states. It also includes Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and other European nations whose economic, diplomatic, and security interests are at stake. Russia and China occupy their respective positions along the shore, each pursuing strategic influence, military access, commercial opportunities, and regional alliances.

Every passenger wants something different. Some want security. Some want influence. Some want oil. Some want revenge. Some want regional dominance. Some want to be left alone. Some want to run the neighborhood. A few seem convinced that God personally drafted their foreign policy.

Unlike the original puzzle, the participants cannot even agree on who the fox is.

To Israel, the fox is Iran. To Iran, the fox is the West. To Saudi Arabia, the fox is Tehran’s regional ambitions. And so on.

The original farmer had one river, three passengers, and a defined set of rules.

President Trump is attempting to navigate a river with at least twenty passengers, competing maps, conflicting destinations, and several travelers who still regard the others as appetizers.

V.P. Vance is now suggesting that a sufficiently creative agreement can align all these interests toward a common future. Trade will supplant conflict. Diplomacy will supplant proxy warfare. Economic growth will supplant ideological confrontation. Old enemies will become reliable partners.

That is not merely a peace agreement. It is a grand theory of human transformation.

The Iranian regime did not spend nearly half a century funding proxy organizations across the Middle East because of a misunderstanding. Hezbollah was not created because regional actors lacked opportunities for commercial development. Hamas does not define itself by terror because it has not been introduced to the benefits of economic integration. The Houthis are not launching missiles into shipping lanes because they have not yet attended enough trade conferences.

These organizations pursue their objectives because those objectives are central to their identities, power structures, and reasons for existing.

The Trump administration argues that economic incentives can alter behavior over time. There is precedent. Nations have changed before. Former enemies have become allies. Germany and Japan emerged from the ashes of World War II to become allies of the United States and pillars of the modern democratic world.

Germany and Japan changed because they lost catastrophic wars, surrendered unconditionally, rewrote their political systems, and spent decades rebuilding under entirely new assumptions. They did not wake up one morning, glance at a memorandum of understanding, and announce that all previous grievances had been canceled because of improved networking opportunities.

The central question facing any agreement with Iran is not whether it can reduce tensions today. The central question is whether it will survive tomorrow.

What happens when Hezbollah conducts what it calls a “limited operation” that Israel calls an act of war?

What happens when Hamas decides that the peace dividend is less appealing than the propaganda value of another conflict?

What happens when the Houthis rekindle their interest in international shipping?

What happens when Iran insists it is fully complying with the agreement while everyone else argues over what compliance means?

What happens when the interests of Russia, China, Europe, the United States, Israel, and Iran conflict rather than align?

What happens when a future American president inherits an agreement negotiated by a predecessor and discovers violations, ambiguities, or provocations that fall short of war but breach the agreement?

These are not theoretical questions.

The most overlooked part of the farmer’s puzzle is that the farmer never leaves. Every successful solution depends on his constant supervision. The moment he walks away, the puzzle collapses.

That is true of international agreements as well.

Any agreement can endure as long as military pressure remains fresh, negotiators remain engaged, and political attention remains focused. The real test comes years later, when administrations change, priorities shift, and enforcement becomes inconvenient.

The farmer eventually leaves the riverbank to tend the farm. The fox remains the fox. The hen remains the hen. The challenge facing President Trump is not simply to carry everyone safely across the river. It is to persuade the predators that they no longer have an appetite.

The original farmer’s puzzle works because he understands that nature matters. He never mistakes the fox for something it is not.

Whether the Middle East can finally be transformed depends on whether its principal actors have truly changed or are merely waiting for the boat to reach the opposite shore.

The real test of any Middle East peace agreement will not come on the day it is signed. It will come years later, when the cameras have gone, the diplomats have moved on, and the fox discovers the hen standing nearby, unattended.

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Trump deserves credit for forcing Iran to the table. That is no small thing. Iran does not negotiate because it has discovered moderation. It negotiates when the alternative is pain.

But let’s state the obvious. There is a difference between forcing Iran to sign a piece of paper and forcing Iran to change its nature. The first is diplomacy. The second is pure fantasy.

The danger is not that Iran refuses to sign. The danger is that it signs and then does what it always does.

No Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Tehran should be mistaken for peace and security. At best, it is a pause. At worst, it is an engraved invitation for Iran to do what it has done for decades: sign solemn language in public, cheat in private, delay inspectors, exploit ambiguity, arm proxies, and then dare the West to prove what the whole world already suspects.

That is the fatal weakness in any Iran deal. Verification takes time. Cheating takes minutes. By the time Washington discovers the full extent of Iranian noncompliance, the American public will have moved on, the headlines will have cooled, the Trump administration will be invested in preserving its achievement, and the same loud voices that demanded an end to the war before the deal will warn that enforcing it after the deal would be “reckless escalation.”

Iran understands this. It has always understood this.

The regime’s strategic advantage is not military strength. It is patience. Iran does not need to defeat America in a war. It only needs to outlast America’s attention span.

Nor is Israel a side issue. It is the test case. If Israel is not a party to this emerging MOU, then Iran has every incentive to keep the formal deal with Washington in its trophy case while outsourcing violence to Hezbollah. The missiles will fly from Lebanon. The denials will come from Tehran. The pressure on Israel to stand down will come from Washington. And when Israel responds to attacks, which it absolutely must, Iran will accuse Jerusalem of destroying the peace.

Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

That is not peace. That is a hostage note with diplomatic letterhead.

The danger is that Trump, eager to preserve a historic settlement, could find himself restraining Israel as much as Iran. In that case, Tehran will have achieved one of its central objectives without firing another missile at an American target: separating the United States from Israel, turning Israeli self-defense into an obstacle to American diplomacy, and converting an American-brokered agreement into a shield for Iranian aggression.

This is why the central question is not whether Iran will sign. Iran signs. The question is what happens after it signs.

History gives us the answer. Iran violated diplomatic obligations during the hostage crisis. It concealed nuclear material and activities from international inspectors. It breached nuclear limits under the JCPOA once the deal no longer served its interests. It made a joke of enhanced inspections. It has likely violated the Chemical Weapons Convention. And through proxies from Hezbollah to Hamas to the Houthis, it has learned how to wage war while pretending not to.

So admire Trump’s willingness to confront Iran. Give him credit for applying pressure where others offered only sermons. But do not confuse a signed MOU with Iranian surrender. With Tehran, the ink is not the end of the conflict. It is the beginning of the next deception.

The paper the MOU is written on may say peace. Iran will read it as time.

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When Steve Hilton unfortunately loses California’s gubernatorial race in November and Spencer Pratt loses the Los Angeles mayoral race, pundits will spend months analyzing their campaigns.

They will debate messaging, fundraising, advertising, candidate quality, performances, endorsements, turnout operations, and whether either candidate should have spent more money.

But let’s be clear.

They will be debating the wrong issue because while both men are top-flight competitors who deserve to win, both races were decided long ago. It was not the day each candidate decided to run. It was not the moment they survived the June 2 “jungle” primary, which took place a few days ago. And it will not be the upcoming November election.

California’s Electoral Architecture.

This is an illusion of a contest. The decisive moments in this election occurred years ago.

California’s march toward one-party rule began with the ballot itself. In 2010, voters approved Proposition 14, creating the “top two” or “jungle” primary system first used statewide in 2012. November was no longer guaranteed to offer voters a Democrat and a Republican.

In a state where Democrats increasingly held overwhelming numerical superiority, the top-two system made it possible for the general election to become a choice between two Democrats, while Republicans were left outside the arena, nose pressed against the glass, wondering why the game started without them.

On September 27, 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 37 into law, permanently requiring that a mail-in ballot be sent to every active registered voter in the state. Three years later, on September 29, 2024, Newsom signed SB 1174 into law, permanently prohibiting cities and counties from establishing voter-identification requirements.

Taken together, these three laws ensured one-party rule and a state that will circle the drain for years to come.

Governor Newscum, as President Trump affectionately calls him, is indeed the arrogant, elitist, narcissistic, out-of-touch, opportunistic fool he’s known to be. As Groucho Marx would say, “He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

An idiot he may be, but Gavin Newsom’s genius is actually third-grade math

The Arithmetic of One-Party Rule

According to the California Secretary of State’s most recent voter-registration report, 10,381,340 Democrats make up about 45 percent of registered voters, while 5,804,699 Republicans account for about 25 percent. Democrats have an advantage of roughly 4.6 million registered voters statewide.

Just as significant is the behavior of the 5,231,189 voters registered as “No Party Preference,” who represent 23 percent of the electorate today. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, independent and No Party Preference voters lean toward the Democratic Party by roughly a 39% to 26% margin. There are 1.8 Democrats for every Republican registered in the state.

Given the Democrats’ nearly 20-point statewide registration advantage and the historic behavior of independents who lean Democratic, Republicans enter statewide and local races with major headwinds before a single television or social media ad is aired.

The result is simple arithmetic.

When one party begins every statewide contest with millions more registered voters than the other, every voter automatically receives a ballot whether they want one or not, and voter ID is a pipe dream, the outcome increasingly resembles a mathematical equation rather than an election.

Campaigns still matter. Candidates still matter. Issues still matter. But it’s mostly theater. They matter only at the margins. The larger reality is that California’s electoral system rests on a registration structure that overwhelmingly favors one party.

Republicans can recruit stronger candidates. They can raise more money. They can sharpen their messaging. They can run flawless campaigns. Yet they remain trapped in an electoral process whose outcome is predetermined.

California Doesn’t Hold Elections. It Processes Outcomes.

There’s no doubt that California’s inability to count votes quickly and determine election outcomes in a single day has made it the laughing stock of the nation. It’s a major problem. But the issue here is not hidden ballots or secret plots. It’s a system designed to make the state’s Democratic advantage permanent. California’s bigger problem is that elections no longer function as genuine contests.

Steve Hilton and Spencer Pratt will not lose because they were outworked, outspent, or outmatched. They will lose because they entered a game whose final score was largely set long before either campaign began. They are running against California’s system, not just their opponents.

The most important campaign in California is no longer about Steve Hilton, Spencer Pratt, or any candidate who follows them. It is about whether California will ever again hold elections whose outcomes are not already baked into the math.

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The world should be grateful that I am not the President of the United States.

Not because I’m indecisive. Quite the opposite. If I were President, there would be no seventh round of negotiations with Iran.

There wouldn’t have been a second.

This is why the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, created a system to prevent people like me from having unchecked authority.

While actual presidents must possess patience, restraint, and a healthy respect for diplomacy, I find myself increasingly eager to stop pretending the Iranian regime is one conference away from becoming Switzerland.

The current strategy appears simple: negotiate, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate some more, and then schedule another negotiation to discuss why the previous negotiations failed.

Iran threatens America. Iran threatens Israel. Iran funds terrorist proxies. Iran advances its nuclear program. Iran vows vengeance. Iran demands another meeting.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

If I were President, my strategy would be far less nuanced.

At 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, I would issue a final warning.

At 8:15 a.m., my National Security Advisor would begin explaining why my proposed response to flatten Iran, from Iraq to Afghanistan, was ill-advised.

By 8:30 a.m., I would ignore him.

At 8:45 a.m., my Secretary of War would ask about proportionality. I would ask whether proportionality had been discussed after American troops were killed by Iranian-backed militias.

By 9:00 a.m., my Secretary of State would ask about the risks of escalation. I would ask whether forty-six years of promising our destruction was generally considered a confidence-building measure.

At 10:00 a.m., I would call my Cabinet together. Call General Caine. Write my Truth Social Post.

By sunset, my directive for our military would be simple: to leave what’s left of the Islamic Republic’s leadership wondering whether governing a country from a cave somewhere in the Hindu Kush might have been the wiser career choice.

My standard would not be whether Iran had been inconvenienced or how the world reacted. It would be whether the ayatollahs suddenly became less concerned with the destruction of America and more concerned with their own continued ability to draw breath.

CNN would host twelve consecutive panels of misguided experts who hate me and predict my impeachment. The United Nations would hold an emergency session.

Yes, I understand that real presidents know wars have consequences. Real presidents understand that the problem with unleashing hell is that someone eventually has to manage the fallout. Real presidents understand that military force is a tool, not an emotional support animal.

I get it.

But after decades of threats, terrorism, proxy warfare, hostage-taking, nuclear deception, and endless diplomatic theater, I confess I am no longer persuaded that the regime fears another round of negotiations.

If anything, they seem comforted by it. They know the meetings will continue, the statements will continue, the deadlines will shift, the warnings will soften, and the diplomats will come and go.

Fortunately, this is not my decision to make. Fortunately, I am not the President.

Every time another Iranian official threatens America while simultaneously denigrating another round of talks, I find myself contemplating responses that would make even my most hawkish friends quietly slide their chairs away from me at dinner.

Iran has spent forty-seven years learning that America always has one more conference, one more summit, one more framework agreement, and one more off-ramp. One begins to suspect that Iran is not trapped in negotiations with us. We are trapped in negotiations with Iran.

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California doesn’t have a leadership problem. In the uncomfortable math of democracy, there is a voter problem.

Political leaders don’t materialize out of thin air. They’re hired. When the same kinds of flawed leaders keep producing the same kinds of flawed results, the only honest place to look isn’t Sacramento or City Hall—it’s the voters marking their ballots.

Just weeks ago, Eric Swalwell—a seven-term congressman and would-be governor—resigned amid serious sexual abuse allegations. His fall was swift.

California’s reaction? Familiar. A collective shrug. Another one? Next.

Another Scandal, Another Shrug

That reflex is the story. Not the scandal itself, but the voter reflex that follows. In California, scandals are no longer shocking. They’re seasonal. They pass through, make noise, and leave the underlying climate unchanged.

We’ve seen it again and again, at every level of government. Different offices. Different cities. Different levels of government.

Same story.

Now, if this were simply a matter of bad actors, the fix would be straightforward: remove them and replace them with better ones. California has done plenty of removing.

What it hasn’t done as a state is improve. The problem isn’t just who gets elected. It’s why they keep getting elected and re-elected despite the miserable results.

How’s That Working out for You?

People are leaving the state in huge numbers, not because California suddenly misplaced its coastline, but because life here increasingly feels like a financial endurance test.

Housing remains scarce, not because the state ran out of land, but because it perfected the art of saying “no” to building on it.

Homelessness remains the worst in the nation, despite spending tens of billions that somehow bought everything except results.

Businesses don’t relocate because they dislike California. They relocate because navigating its regulatory structure feels like applying for a permit just to exist.

Taxes sit at the top of the national charts. The return on investment—measured by services, infrastructure, and results—is pitiful. Through it all, one constant remains: the same Democratic political alignment has dominated state government for years, with margins large enough to eliminate meaningful competition. There’s no accountability.

Why?

The Real Problem

Because too many voters have quietly decided that accountability is optional. Instead of evaluating results, they evaluate intentions. Instead of tracking outcomes, they track affiliation. Instead of seeking competence, they judge by identity. Instead of asking “Did this work?” they don’t ask the question. That’s the problem.

It’s governance by vibe.

Here, candidates campaign on compassion. Policies are judged by aspiration. When the results fall far short, the explanation machine spins up: the problem was bigger than expected, it’s Trump’s fault, the solution just needs more time, more money, more hope, more belief.

And voters accept it.

In a healthy system, failure carries consequences. In California, failure creates narratives.

The housing crisis isn’t mismanagement—it’s complexity.
The homelessness crisis isn’t a failure—it requires more empathy.
The business exodus isn’t policy—it’s a misunderstanding.

When outcomes stop mattering, improvement stops.

In California, politicians don’t have to be effective—they just have to be aligned. Messaging outpaces performance. Intent substitutes for outcomes. This is how you end up with a state where scandals come and go, policies persist despite poor results, and the underlying problems grow more entrenched.

Why Spencer Pratt Matters

Now, every so often, the system produces a jolt. Enter a reality TV star, Spencer Pratt.

Not a career politician. Not a policy veteran. Not what anyone in the political establishment would design in a lab.

And yet, here he is—running an outsider campaign for LA mayor that is, miraculously, beginning to register, draw attention, and, in the process, embarrass a political class that has grown far too comfortable explaining away failure.

His motivation isn’t theoretical. It’s personal.

When his home and nearly 8,000 others in the Pacific Palisades were destroyed by fire, courtesy of the incompetence of Mayor Karen Bass and City Hall, it didn’t just expose the risks Californians face. It exposed what comes after. A rebuilding process defined by layers of regulation, delays, permits, reviews, and second-guessing that turns recovery into a superhuman endurance test. At the very moment residents were confronting walls of fire, loss, and uncertainty, Bass was on a political junket overseas—a detail so stark that it became a symbol of a government that’s distant when it’s needed most.

What followed wasn’t just frustration. It was a wake-up call.

That the system isn’t working.
That the obstacles aren’t incidental; they’re structural.
And that the people living through it, unfortunately, are expected to absorb the cost.

That’s the message Pratt is tapping into, not because he has all the answers, but because he is willing to say, plainly, what many voters have avoided confronting: The system isn’t working. And continuing to vote the same way while expecting different outcomes is not a strategy.

It’s a bad habit.

The Voters Still Own This

Disruption doesn’t fix governance. Outsiders don’t guarantee results. Protest votes don’t replace informed decision-making. The responsibility still rests where it always has: with the voters.

They can continue to vote on emotion. They can continue to reward rhetoric over results. They can continue to ignore the link between policy and outcome.

Or they can change.

They can demand results. They can insist on accountability. They can treat elections less as expressions of identity and more as performance reviews.

California doesn’t face a leadership crisis. It faces a hiring problem.

And until the people doing the hiring decide that results matter more than rhetoric, the next scandal, the next disappointment, and the next round of familiar problems are not merely possible.

They’re guaranteed.

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Two months into the war with Iran, the scoreboard is no longer theoretical. It’s heavily lopsided.

According to multiple assessments, U.S.–Israeli operations have struck more than 15,000 targets across Iran, dismantled command-and-control nodes, ensured near-total air superiority for our forces, eliminated its Air Force, and sunk its Navy.

Iran’s missile and drone barrages, once touted as biblical, collapsed in practice. Launch rates fell by roughly 90 percent from the war’s opening days, largely because the launchers themselves are nearly gone.

Even now, when Iran attempts retaliation -- missiles, drones, fast boats -- the results are telling: intercepted, neutralized, or sunk before they can matter.

After decades of promising to unleash the “Gates of Hell,” the Iranian regime now seems to be struggling to keep the lights on in the parking garage.

1979: The Birth of the Trash-Talk Republic

This “trash talk” tradition began with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who introduced the world to a new genre of foreign policy: apocalyptic branding.

America became “the Great Satan.” Israel became “the Little Satan.” And the United States was assured that: “America cannot do a damn thing.”

These were bold opening lines that have aged poorly since 1979. Since then, Iran’s leadership has not only maintained the rhetoric but also escalated it into performance art.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s former president, promised in 2005 that Israel would be “wiped off the map.” Twenty years later, it remains located just west of Jordan. The nation’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, eliminated by a bunker-busting bomb two months ago, warned that any attack on Iran would be met with a response that would “turn the region into a sea of blood.”

Others warned that Israel would be “leveled in minutes, destroyed by a single bomb.” One official went so far as to say that Iran would “erase American cities from existence” if provoked. This is a regime that has never met a superlative it didn’t like.

Enter the IRGC: “From the Sea to the River”

The IRGC screenwriters have reversed course on Khamenei’s warning of a “sea of blood” if Iran were attacked. They now repeatedly vow to create “rivers of blood” that will flow in retaliation for any strike on Iranian soil.

Which brings us to Qasem Soleimani, their most mythologized figure. For years, he was portrayed as untouchable, the mastermind, the ghost in the machine, a man whose mere presence was supposed to deter conflict.

That is, until January 2020, when a U.S. drone strike removed him from the board like a clerical error. No “firestorm of revenge,” as promised. No region-wide inferno. Just a brief volley of missiles and a long, awkward silence where the apocalypse had been scheduled.

After the killing of Qasem Soleimani, officials promised that his death would be avenged with, what else, more blood, this time “spilled across the region.” My personal favorite? “Every drop of Soleimani’s blood will bring down America.”

And Still… the Script Continues

Fast forward to today.

After losing launchers, ships, infrastructure, and three tiers of its leadership, the regime is still workshopping new material, something between medieval prophecy and a rejected Game of Thrones script.

The statements include warnings that U.S. forces will face “unimaginable consequences,” be hunted “house-to-house,” and be “reduced to dust.” There are renewed promises of “crushing retaliation at a time and place of our choosing.” At this point, “time and place of our choosing” is starting to sound like “we’ll get back to you.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth for Tehran: Instead of “cities reduced to dust,” what we’ve seen reduced to dust are the reputations of the men making the threat.

Someday, historians will write the obituary for the Islamic Republic of Iran. They’ll note repression, terrorism, sanctions, and economic decay.

But what will most surely stand out is the sheer scale of its rhetorical ambition, because no regime in modern history has talked a bigger game and delivered less when it mattered most to them.

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There’s a remarkable new development in California politics: Democrats are no longer denying that they’ve ruined the state. They’re competing over who ruined it more.

It all began when the party, in a preemptive act of political self-preservation, took out its own frontrunner, Eric Swalwell, before he could potentially destroy their 15-year hold on the Governorship. Better to force him to resign than risk exposing, in real time, the judgment that defines the party’s bench. Nothing focuses a race like watching the leading candidate disqualified not by the opposition, but by his own side’s recognition that he could not survive allegations of rape and sexual abuse.

And just like that, the party that spent years assuring voters that every problem under the California sun was Donald Trump’s fault opened its marquee contest with a reminder that its “best and brightest” are, at minimum, politically indefensible and, at worst, emblematic of a deeper rot. California is broken, a claim Republicans have made since the days of dial-up internet, and one Democrats are now documenting in detail.

For years, Republicans have been wandering the political wilderness here like prophets no one invited to dinner, warning about high taxes, rising costs, homelessness, regulatory overreach, and a general sense that the Golden State has lost its luster somewhere between Sacramento and the DMV.

But now, miracle of miracles, the Democratic gubernatorial primary has produced something no GOP campaign ever could: Democrats making the Republican case for them, but with even better production values.

Exhibit A: The Billionaire Who Bought Himself a Conscience

Take Tom Steyer, the billionaire candidate and apparent new Democratic frontrunner whose central pitch is that he is incorruptible because, as he tells it, his corruption is behind him.

His opponents beg to differ. They have seized on his wealth with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. According to Democrats, wealthy elites have too much influence. They should be taxed out of existence. And speaking of wealthy elites, have you met Tom?

He’s spent well over $100 million trying to buy the Governorship, they say. “A billionaire trying to buy redemption.” Or, more precisely, a man attempting to buy distance from the very system that made him. He’s made his money from fossil fuels, “got rich off polluters and ICE prisons,” and conveniently reinvented himself just in time to run for office. He represents everything Democrats claim to oppose: money, influence, and inequality.

The truth is that Steyer didn’t parachute into a blue-state experiment gone wrong. He helped build, finance, and sustain it. He’s been a major donor, activist, and participant in the very Democratic ecosystem that has run California into the ground for decades. Now he wants credit for noticing the damage. The true critique isn’t that money distorts the system—it’s that the system he helped build and fund is the one now under indictment.

Exhibit B: The Insiders Who Are Shocked to Find an Insider

Then there’s Xavier Becerra, who has spent his career in Washington and Sacramento and now finds himself in the awkward position of an “insider” defending the very system his rivals insist is the problem.

Negative ads now circulating online don’t just question his record. They prosecute it. They’re hanging a moral indictment around his neck, pointing to his tenure as Biden’s HHS secretary during the chaotic handling of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors who crossed our southern border illegally.

“He lost track of 85,000 children,” they say, collapsing a sprawling federal failure into a single, devastating line of accountability. He’s responsible for the “slavery, rape, abuse of children” committed against those who were “trafficked, abused, and forced to work.” It’s a striking escalation and a striking admission: Democrats accusing a fellow Democrat not just of failure but of presiding over consequences they once insisted were exaggerated or simply false.

At this point, the primary has officially shifted from policy disagreement to mutual indictment. It’s gone from “you’re ineffective” to “we’re culpable.”

Becerra isn’t just adjacent to one-party Democrat rule. He is its resume. He’s a product of it, a beneficiary of it, and an architect of it. Running against the outcomes of that system is like suing yourself for damages.

Exhibit C: The Intermittent Explosive Disorder Populist

Enter Katie Porter, wielding her trademark whiteboard and anger management issues once reserved for Republicans.

Porter’s now-famous outbursts of outrage, directed at reporters and her employees, have been a gift to her opponents. Combative to a fault, she’s easily irritated and struggles under pressure. “If she can’t manage her temper, she can’t manage a state,” her opponents now say. That line has moved from opposition research to mainstream Democratic concern.

She’s a walking, talking toxic work environment. She’s a case study in the very workplace dysfunction her party claims to regulate. She also reeks of theater, not governance, in a state governed exclusively by Democrats, while campaigning against the consequences of Democratic governance. She’s a performer in search of a system she’s never had to run.

Her whiteboard has run out of space for arrows pointing at anything other than her.

A Moment of Accidental Clarity

What makes this primary so entertaining, if you enjoy political irony, is that each Democrat is effectively running the same “Pogo”-themed campaign: “We have met the enemy, and they is us.”

The only remaining question is whether voters will draw the same conclusion the candidates have already drawn. At some point -- even in California -- voters may begin to connect the dots that Democrats themselves have so helpfully drawn.

Steve Hilton, good luck. If irony were a renewable resource, California could power the nation’s entire electrical grid.

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Four miles from my home in Hidden Hills -- roughly the distance it takes a coyote to ruin your morning -- rises California’s newest monument to well-meaning excess: the $114 million Wallace Annenberg Wildlife Bridge spanning Route 101.

For years, on my drive to work at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, I watched this structure take shape. It’s an architectural reminder that in California, we no longer solve problems as much as commission them at nine figures.

The premise is noble enough: helping wildlife cross the freeway safely. But like most noble ideas under Progressive-party rule in Sacramento, it collapses under the weight of one small, inconvenient fact: there is already plenty of wildlife here. An abundance, really. A thriving, well-fed, unapologetically carnivorous abundance.

From Ventura County to Pasadena and beyond, we don’t need to import more mountain lions. We have a subscription.

On average, a resident in my neighborhood of Hidden Hills (also known as “where the Kardashians live”) loses a dog or cat to coyotes and the occasional large cat every week. These are not strays. Not reckless explorers. Beloved pets, in fenced yards, during broad daylight, often within sight of their owners. The phrase “secure backyard” has become less a description and more a punchline.

Which brings us to the bridge: a taxpayer-funded wildlife concierge service meant to make it easier for predators to expand their dining choices.

You can call it conservation. The pets call it Uber Eats.

To better understand local sentiment, I commissioned a survey -- arguably the most honest one conducted in California this year -- of 60 residents who experience firsthand the consequences of “enhanced wildlife mobility.” The respondents were dogs, cats, and horses living on my street.

Their verdict was…decisive.

Out of 60 surveyed, 59 opposed the bridge. The only supporter? A pit bull. No further comment was given, though tail wagging was seen, possibly at the chance of finally getting some revenge on a mountain lion in a more formal setting.

The rest, including our own dog, Lulu (pictured below), were, well, less enthusiastic.

Horses, large enough to be mistaken for confidence itself, voted 14–0 against. Cats, who fear nothing and respect no one, also went 12–0 in opposition, a rare show of unanimity from a species that generally refuses to agree even with gravity. Dogs, normally open to new experiences (mail carriers notwithstanding), came in at 33–1 against.

When animals reject a policy that’s supposed to help other animals at a 98.3% rate, it might be time to rethink the approach, or at least stop building bridges.

But in California, the reasoning works differently. We are told this is about coexistence, balance, and harmony between humans and nature. It’s a lovely idea, as long as you’re not the one being harmonized.

Governor Gavin Newsom has overseen a state where residents are leaving, businesses are relocating, and costs continue to rise steadily into the stratosphere. Housing? Out of reach. Taxes? Sky-high. Regulations? Plentiful enough to require their own migration corridor.

And yet, when faced with these challenges, Sacramento looked at its checkbook and said: You know what we need? A better commute for mountain lions.

It would be one thing if this were just a rounding error. It is not. One hundred and fourteen million dollars is not a rounding error. It’s a statement. A statement that, in California, priorities are no longer merely misplaced; they are actively sightseeing.

Imagine explaining this to a family who just lost their dog to a predator.

“We’re very sorry,” you might say. “But take comfort in knowing that somewhere, a mountain lion is enjoying a more convenient crossing experience.”

This is the moment when the defenders of the bridge invoke the broader ecological vision. Wildlife corridors! Genetic diversity! Long-term sustainability!

All worthy goals, on paper. But here, in practice, sustainability already has a face. It resembles a coyote trotting through a neighborhood at dusk—completely comfortable, entirely unbothered, and uninterested in waiting for a bridge.

Nature, it turns out, does not require a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

What it truly requires, as it always has, is a balance between preservation and practicality. The bridge isn’t just unnecessary; it’s symbolic. It embodies, in one sweeping curve of concrete, the core philosophy of modern California: when a problem arises, spend extravagantly to address its abstract version, while the real one prowls your own backyard.

The politicians might be committed. The environmentalists might be applauding. But our own animals -- the ones experiencing the consequences -- have spoken with remarkable clarity.

And they are not impressed.

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Long ago and far away, my Master’s thesis indicated an inverse relationship between the length of military conflicts and the American media’s willingness to accept our nation’s involvement.

If modern history teaches us anything, it’s that wars should ideally be wrapped up before the press corps finishes its first week of coverage.

Preferably by Thursday.

This lesson seems to have been taken very seriously by the White House press pool, which has spent the first twelve days of the Iran conflict asking President Trump questions that would make even a Vegas sportsbook blush.

Just one week into the fighting, a reporter breathlessly asked:

“You’re one week in now… how long do you expect operations to continue?”

One week.

For context, World War II lasted six years. Korea was three years. Afghanistan went on for two decades. But apparently the modern press now treats the end of hostilities like Amazon Prime: if it hasn’t arrived in 48 hours, someone wants a refund.

The media’s fixation on a schedule reveals something. War, it seems, stubbornly doesn’t stick to a newsroom calendar. Battles take time. Strategy takes time. Intelligence takes time. Logistics take time.

But if you listen closely to some of the questions fired at the President before the U.S. attacked Iran, you’d think the Pentagon was behind on a DoorDash order.

“Just checking in,” the tone suggests. “Your invasion was supposed to be here by now.”

The Body-Count Question

Then came perhaps the most grotesque question of the week.

A reporter informed the President that eight American service members had been killed and asked:

“How many American deaths are you willing to have in this war?”

This question deserves to be read twice.

Not because it’s profound, but because it assumes that presidents conduct wars like accountants manage spreadsheets, deciding in advance the acceptable number of American deaths before closing the books.

Eight deaths into a war against a country of 90 million people, the press corps apparently expected the Commander-in-Chief to set a body-count limit.

“Thirty-two,” perhaps. “Thirty-three if the weekend news cycle is slow.”

No one who has ever studied military history or basic human decency believes wars are fought that way. But it was a question that served a different purpose: framing the war as already too costly before it had barely begun.

Another reporter asked whether Trump expected to attend more dignified transfers of fallen soldiers at Dover Air Force Base. In war, sadly, that possibility is always real.

But the timing -- less than two weeks into combat -- felt less like sober reflection and more like a search for imagery: the president standing beside flag-draped coffins.

In modern political warfare, visuals matter. And nothing ends a war faster in the public imagination than the right photograph.

It Has to Be America’s Fault

Equally telling have been the repeated questions asked about an alleged bombing of a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran:

“Did the United States bomb a girls’ elementary school… and kill 175 people?”

Not “Did Iran stage this?”
Not “What evidence do we have?”

No, the question arrived with the implication baked in: surely America did it.

Because if the United States were blamed for children’s deaths, the political narrative would instantly shift from a war against Iran’s regime to an American atrocity.

It’s the sort of question that sounds less like an inquiry and more like a wish.

The Hope Beneath the Questions

Each question could be defended as “tough journalism” on its own, but taken together, they reveal something else.

A pattern.

Not curiosity about the strategy. Not an interest in the objectives. Not even a desire to understand how the war might be won.

Instead, the questions circle endlessly around three themes:

How long will this take?
How many Americans will die?
Did America just do something terrible?

It’s not reporting on a war. It’s rooting for a narrative.

The Real Clock

Wars don’t end on a media schedule. They end when one side either loses the ability or the will to keep fighting.

The American Civil War lasted four years.
World War II lasted six.
The Cold War lasted half a century.

If those conflicts had been covered the way modern press briefings sound, Abraham Lincoln would have been asked by week two when Richmond would fall. Or...

“General Eisenhower, how many American deaths are you willing to tolerate before reconsidering the liberation of Europe?”

There is nothing wrong with questioning presidents during wartime. A free press should ask tough questions. However, this war will have to move forward on the inconvenient timeline of reality rather than the one preferred by reporters who are already interested in writing the story of its failure.

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Washington has subtly adopted a new foreign policy doctrine: the Cult of Imminence.

Under this theory -- supported by Democrats in Congress and widely echoed by the media -- the United States should not take action against a hostile regime until the threat is so “imminent” that it is practically already happening.

In other words, unless the enemy is already firing, we should stay calm, avoid overreacting, and politely wait our turn.

This debate has reignited over U.S. military action against Iran, with critics arguing that the administration has failed to prove an “imminent threat” to American lives. Apparently, even the world’s main state sponsor of terrorism, which funds militias, chants “Death to America,” and attacks U.S. forces through proxies, still hasn’t reached the necessary level of menace.

The threat, we’re told, was insufficiently imminent. Which raises a question:

How imminent is imminent enough?

Apparently, the modern definition of imminence is remarkably precise.

Not likely.
Not probable.
Not inevitable.

Imminent.

The enemy can threaten us for years, arm his proxies, train his terrorists, test his missiles, and chant “Death to America” at regular intervals. But until the attack reaches the final stage of execution, we are advised to stay calm.

Preferably right up until the shooting starts.

The strength of the “imminence” standard is that, for Trump’s opponents, it offers a perfect recipe for deadlock. If you define legitimate self-defense as action taken only at the exact moment an attack is unavoidable, you’ve essentially banned prevention entirely.

Military strategy, inconveniently, works in the opposite way. Nations attempt to stop threats before they reach the final stage of execution. The purpose of intelligence, alliances, and deterrence is to break the process between hostile intent and incoming missiles.

But under Washington’s new rules, that apparently qualifies as jumping the gun.

If the rule is that you have to wait until the very last moment, then congratulations: you’ve just redefined strategy as reaction.

And this is where the Democrats’ rhetoric quietly shifts.

Once the standard for legitimate action becomes perfect imminence, any effort to prevent a threat earlier can be dismissed with a now familiar phrase: a “war of choice.”

Under this theory, the United States should only go to war when it is absolutely necessary, with necessity defined so narrowly that it applies only when an attack has already begun.

Missiles already in the air?
That’s necessity.

Enemy forces already crossing the border?
Necessity.

Terrorists already inside the wire?
Now we’re getting somewhere.

Anything less than that—any attempt to stop the threat while it is still forming—becomes optional. That’s how prevention gets labeled as a choice. Threats rarely arrive all at once like a thunderclap.

They assemble themselves piece by piece—training, weapons, proxies, test runs—until the final act appears sudden only to those who weren’t paying attention.

Iran has been conducting that rehearsal for years.

First the threats.
Then the proxies.
Then the weapons.

And eventually the explosions.

For years, its operatives supplied militias in Iraq with explosively formed penetrators (IEDs), roadside bombs specifically designed to pierce American armored vehicles. In Washington, that apparently didn’t count as imminent. It only became imminent a few milliseconds later when Humvees exploded, and American soldiers were killed and wounded.

In 2007, Iran-backed militants trained and infiltrated a U.S. compound in Karbala, wearing American-style uniforms, and murdered five American soldiers. The attack had been planned for weeks, but the threat apparently only crossed the imminence threshold somewhere between the handcuffs and gunshots.

Iranian-backed militias fired rockets into a U.S. base in Iraq in 2019, killing an American contractor and wounding U.S. troops. The rockets themselves became imminent shortly before they landed.

In 2020, Iran escalated the situation by launching ballistic missiles directly at American bases in Iraq, injuring more than a hundred service members. One assumes the missiles crossed the imminence threshold somewhere around the time they began descending.

Meanwhile, Iranian operatives have repeatedly been linked to plots to kill high-ranking American officials, including President Trump — threats that seem to stay in the realm of theory until the hired assassin actually shows up at the door.

And in 2024, an Iranian-backed militia flew a drone into a U.S. outpost in Jordan, killing three American soldiers. The drone, unfortunately, failed to submit the proper paperwork certifying that the attack had met Washington’s official criteria for imminence.

The politics of imminence has its benefits. It lets critics oppose any use of force without needing to say anything positive about the regime in question. They just require proof that the threat was seconds from happening.

And since intelligence about hostile intentions rarely includes a handy countdown clock, the standard is impossible to meet.

And that’s exactly the point of it.

The doctrine of perfect imminence produces exactly one predictable result. The moment everyone finally agrees the threat was real will also be the moment it’s too late to stop it.

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On whether to strike Iran, Tucker Carlson’s argument has been simple, punchy, and devastatingly effective.

Israel has been crying wolf.

For decades, he says, Israeli leaders, especially Benjamin Netanyahu, have warned that Iran is on the brink of developing a nuclear weapon. Always “months away,” “minutes away,” and just about to cross the street.

And yet, Carlson notes, here we are. No Iranian bomb. No nuclear flash over Tel Aviv. No apocalypse.

Quoting Carlson: “Benjamin Netanyahu has been saying exactly the same thing about Iran… since at least 1996. Thirty years.”

More Carlson: “Some foreigner shows up in our capital every year for 30 years… telling the same lies.”

That’s the thesis.

If the threat were real, if Iran were truly “minutes away,” then surely the bomb would exist by now. The fact that it doesn’t, Carlson implies, proves the immediacy was always exaggerated. The alarm was the strategy. The wolf never came. It’s a powerful argument.

It’s also ridiculous.

While Carlson recounts thirty years of warnings, he conveniently skips over thirty years of interventions -- cyberattacks, assassinations, sabotage, sanctions, diplomatic constraints, and now outright war -- that repeatedly disrupted the very program he now treats as imaginary.

If you’re going to accuse someone of crying wolf, you should at least mention the guard dogs at the gate.

The Clock That Kept Getting Reset

Nuclear and missile facilities in Iran have mysteriously exploded over the years. Centrifuge assembly halls have been damaged. Power grids have failed at convenient moments. Supply chains have been choked by sanctions targeting precision components needed for enrichment.

In 2010, Stuxnet physically destroyed centrifuges at Natanz. Not rhetorically destroyed. Mechanically destroyed.

In the early 2010s, several Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated. In 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, widely described as the architect of Iran’s weaponization program, was killed in an operation so advanced it sounded like something out of a spy novel.

But in Carlson’s version of events, none of it counts.

Then there’s the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA, which Iran observed from 2015 to 2018. Under that deal, Iran’s stockpile was reduced, advanced centrifuges were capped, and breakout time was stretched to roughly a year. The JCPOA, while fundamentally flawed, slowed enrichment while it was in force. When it unraveled and enrichment resumed beyond prior limits, breakout time shrank again.

And then there was 2025 — the year disruption went fully kinetic.

Israel directly struck Iranian nuclear facilities. The United States followed with its own attacks on key enrichment sites. Centrifuge halls were damaged, infrastructure degraded, and power systems were disrupted.

Yet in Carlson’s telling, this too dissolves into the background noise of “thirty years,” as if missiles hitting centrifuge facilities are just another example of rhetorical overreach.

If the wolf never came, it might be worth noting how often someone shot at it.

“The Goalposts Are Being Moved”

Which brings us to his complaint that “the goalposts are being moved.” But what he calls moving goalposts are actually changing conditions. Breakout time is not a prophecy; it’s an estimate based on enrichment levels, centrifuge efficiency, stockpile size, and inspection access.

When centrifuges are destroyed, breakout lengthens.
When stockpiles grow, breakout shortens.
When enrichment caps are imposed, breakout extends.
When they expire, breakout shrinks.

This isn’t a morality play. It’s industrial engineering.

Carlson’s thesis depends on selective subtraction.

Subtract Stuxnet. Subtract assassinations. Subtract sabotage. Subtract sanctions. Subtract the JCPOA’s restrictions. Subtract covert operations. Subtract outright military attacks.

Then point to the absence of a bomb and declare victory. It’s like declaring deterrence a myth because the missiles were never launched.

The Real Question

None of this proves that Iran was literally “minutes away” in 1996. Find me a moment when political rhetoric, especially when a nation’s survival is at stake, hasn’t compressed timelines for emphasis.

The historical record shows a nuclear program that advanced, stalled, advanced again, and was repeatedly disrupted.

No, the honest debate here is about strategy:

Should the U.S. disengage?
Contain?
Strike?
Negotiate a stronger deal?

Those are serious arguments. Trump ended them last night.

Dismissing three decades of intelligence, sabotage, diplomacy, sanctions, and war as “the same lies” ignores the inconvenient reality that actions were, and are, being taken, often at significant risk and cost, to prevent exactly the outcome Carlson now cites as proof that there was never a threat.

The absence of an Iranian bomb does not prove the warnings were false. It proves the warnings were heeded.

You don’t measure deterrence by the number of explosions that happen. You measure it by those that don’t.

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When Gavin Newsom recently told a predominantly black audience in Atlanta that he was “a 960 SAT guy,” he meant to charm. “I’m like you,” he said. The line backfired, of course. The intent was humility. The effect was closer to a stereotype. It embodied the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that has come to define the Democratic Party over the years.

Newsom’s bigotry aside, his intent was clear: I struggled. I’m relatable. I’m not a spreadsheet with cufflinks. I’m human.

In retail politics, that’s gold. As an executive, it’s a tell.

Let’s be precise. In the mid-1980s, when Newsom took the SAT, the national average was just above 1000. A 960 wasn’t catastrophic. It wasn’t bottom-tier. By simple distribution math, it falls slightly below average. Translated to an IQ score, it sits comfortably in the mid-90s.

That fact, by itself, means very little. Standardized tests are imperfect. Many bright people score poorly. Many unremarkable intellects, like mine, master the mechanics of standardized tests. But when a governor voluntarily spotlights his less-than-average score as part of his public brand, he invites scrutiny of what that signal implies.

Because California is not a slightly-below-average problem. California is a trillion-dollar puzzle box.

Housing policy is a dense web of zoning, CEQA constraints, municipal fragmentation, incentive distortions, and interlocking political veto points. Homelessness is an overlapping Venn diagram of addiction policy, mental health infrastructure, public safety doctrine, and land-use paralysis. Wildfire management involves climate modeling, forestry science, insurance markets, and regulatory reform.

These are not vibes problems. They are systems problems.

And systems problems reward a very specific cognitive profile: high tolerance for abstraction, long-chain causal reasoning, comfort with nonlinear feedback loops, and the ability to hold multiple interacting variables in working memory without dropping any. These are capabilities I am not particularly good at. Neither is Newsom.

Social intelligence, which Newsom clearly possesses in abundance, is a distinct skill set. It’s eye contact and tone modulation. It’s coalition-building and narrative framing. It’s reading a room and adjusting the pitch.

That’s extraordinarily useful for becoming governor. It is far less useful for unwinding a 40-year accumulation of regulatory nightmares or, I don’t know, angling for a promotion with global consequences.

California, under Gavin Newsom, is not a state suffering from a lack of empathy. It’s a state suffering from insufficient correction. Policies are layered atop one another. Funding is poured into programs with little oversight. Budgets grow. So do the homeless encampments. Announcements outpace outcomes. The machinery clanks along. But the problems persist.

This is not an argument that intelligence alone guarantees effective governance. History is littered with brilliant men who engineered catastrophe. IQ is not wisdom. It is not discipline. It is not courage.

But when the math gets hard, charm does not carry the decimal.

Running the fifth-largest economy in the world, as Newsom brags each day, is not the same as running a wine business or a city council. It requires relentless analysis and modeling of second- and third-order consequences. It requires comfort with unpopular structural surgery. It requires someone who sees not just the headline but the architecture beneath the social ill.

Newsom’s strength has always been social intelligence. He reads rooms well and navigates media ecosystems with agility.

California’s problems, however, do not appear to be impressed.

Housing remains punishingly expensive. Homeless encampments continue to sprawl despite historic spending. Insurance companies are fleeing wildfire zones. Energy costs are outrageous. Residents, rich and poor, are not migrating east in silence.

California does not need more narrative. The state is not short on charm. Like the nation, it is short on fundamental, structural correction. And while being “one of us” makes for terrific applause lines, governing at this scale requires something else entirely.

There is nothing wrong with being ordinary. There is something wrong with mistaking ordinary for sufficient. California’s challenges are extraordinary, but its leadership style is not.

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If cheering for your own country now feels complicated, that’s new.

When a major publication like the Huffington Post suggests that patriotic fervor at the Olympics may warrant introspection rather than applause, it tells us less about hockey and more about ourselves.

I am surely dating myself, but I remember watching a scrappy band of college kids my age skate into Lake Placid in 1980 and do something objectively, unapologetically American: they beat the unbeatable. The U.S. men’s national ice hockey team defeated the Soviet juggernaut to win the gold medal, a victory we now canonize as the Miracle on Ice.

And when Al Michaels shouted, “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”, the nation did not pause to unpack its complex feelings about flag-waving. We waved. We yelled. We believed.

Fast forward to today. The U.S. Olympic hockey team wins the gold medal, generates buzz, and a headline offers this helpful emotional diagnosis: if patriotic fervor makes you uncomfortable, there’s a name for that feeling.

Apparently, it’s no longer “joy.” It’s a condition.

We have arrived at a stage of civilization where chanting for your own country during the Olympics is treated as if it requires an apology, as if it is something you should grow out of. Somehow, normal national pride has been rebranded as an unresolved psychological event.

Let’s be clear. America has flaws. We eat too much sugar, carry too much debt, and, in the last decade, have produced too many Marvel sequels. But the Olympics are one of the few global gatherings where rooting for your own team is not only allowed — it’s the entire point.

Imagine explaining our modern discomfort to the 1980 team.

“Gentlemen, congratulations on defeating the Soviet machine during the Cold War. However, some viewers are experiencing flag-related unease.”

The Soviet Union men’s national ice hockey team did not show up in Lake Placid, worried about whether their fan base felt existential tension about national identity. They showed up to win. And Americans showed up to beat them.

That’s sport. That’s rivalry. That’s the harmless pageantry of human tribalism contained within sixty minutes and a sheet of ice.

And here’s what made this recent victory feel especially clarifying: it came during an Olympics in which several high-profile American athletes treated their brief global platform less as a podium for excellence and more as a political press conference. Some used the moment to criticize the very country whose flag they wore. Others chose to compete under another nation’s banner, free to do so precisely because they were raised, trained, educated, and funded in a nation that allows such choices.

That’s their right. Freedom cuts both ways. But it creates a strange tableau: a country generous enough to subsidize your rise, defend your liberties, and broadcast your dissent to the world . . . and then watch you publicly indict it while heading for the medal stand.

Which is precisely why a straightforward, unapologetic hockey win felt like oxygen. No disclaimers. No manifestos. Just a team competing as Americans, for Americans, and unembarrassed about it.

What’s really fascinating isn’t that some Americans feel ambivalent about patriotism. Ambivalence is as American as jazz. What’s fascinating is the performative display of that ambivalence, worn like a varsity letterman’s jacket stitched with “Self-Loathing.”

Somewhere along the line in America, skepticism morphed into self-flagellation. Healthy critique, essential in a republic, curdled into a reflexive allergy to national pride. If you cheer too loudly, you’re simplistic. If you fly a flag, you’re suspect. If you believe your country can still produce moments of shared triumph, you must be naïve.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: shared triumph matters.

In 1980, the Miracle on Ice didn’t erase inflation, political division, or geopolitical anxiety. It didn’t end the Cold War. It didn’t fix Washington. What it did was remind a weary country that the improbable is possible.

It created common ground. For a few hours, Americans weren’t red or blue. They were red, white, and loud. Today, we could use a little more loud.

The irony is that the Olympics are one of the few remaining civic rituals in which disagreement is supposed to pause. We just cheer.

And maybe that’s the part that unnerves some cultural commentators: joy without a disclaimer. Pride without hedging. The Miracle on Ice endures not because it was politically perfect but because it was emotionally honest. A group of young Americans beat the odds. The crowd roared. The flag waved. No one needed therapy afterward.

You don’t have to believe America is flawless to believe it’s worth rooting for. You don’t have to ignore injustice to celebrate excellence. You can criticize the republic and still cheer the team that wears its name on its chest.

Here’s a modest proposal. The next time the U.S. hockey team makes a run and the arena erupts in “USA! USA!” try this radical experiment: join in.

You may discover that national pride, like skating, is a muscle. Neglect it long enough, and it atrophies. Exercise it occasionally, and it builds strength alongside perspective, humility, and, yes, accountability.

Do you believe in miracles? We used to. And nothing in modern America requires us to stop.

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