Surprise, surprise.

Many of those who promised during 2023 and early 2024 that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” are now deeply concerned about President Trump’s mental acuity.

Told you this was coming.

Those “We missed the story” mea culpas from a while back were never about contrition, or even real embarrassment. These people had no problem lying about Biden’s fitness — they just couldn’t get away with it any longer. So they changed strategy. They started laying the groundwork to pretend later they had “learned their lesson” so they could go hard after the current president over the same issue.

MS NOW’s Jonathan Capehart, for example, remarked recently that “We should be talking about [Trump’s] mental acuity.”

“Why are we not talking about his mental acuity when we, when we … more people should be talking about it in the way they were giving President Biden hell for walking with a stiff gait,” he said.

The final sentence gives the game away, describing Biden’s obvious mental and physical deterioration merely as “a stiff gait.” As anyone with eyeballs during that era can tell you, the problems went well beyond this. They were less “stiff gait” and more “he’s talking to dead people again.”

Biden was so badly out of it that federal prosecutors felt sorry for him and decided not to pursue him for crimes he admitted to on tape on the grounds that he was an “elderly man with a poor memory.” The problems were real, and they were obvious — despite efforts by people like Capehart, who hosted Biden for extra-chummy softball questions about his fitness for office, to fool you into thinking otherwise.

“Why I get so enraged by this is, why is [Trump] being given a pass?” Capehart demanded. “He’s President of the United States! No other president would be able to survive.”

It is a hollow commentary that downplays Biden’s evident senility while pushing hard to oversell Trump’s mostly longstanding peculiarities. And he does this after participating in a concerted effort to portray Biden as vibrant, cogent, and vigorous — all lies, of course. The simpler explanation is that Capehart cares about neither president’s health, nor does he care particularly for the truth.

Speaking of party collaborators, let us not forget Joe Scarborough, also of MS NOW, who remarked recently, “For a president who has always been erratic, as he turns 80, we are seeing some diminished capacities [as] with anybody who would turn 80.”

He added, “But that erraticism, we are seeing it exaggerated.”

For context, Scarborough was among those fighting to the last man in the last-ditch effort to save Biden’s reelection campaign.

In 2024, as Biden lurched toward an uncontested renomination, Scarborough famously declared: “[H]e’s far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically, because he’s been around for 50 years. … Start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And f— you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second.”

Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race four months later.

To be fair, Scarborough is not overselling Trump’s supposed dotage the way Capehart has been doing. He recently remarked that any suggestion that Trump “has dementia or is losing his mind or whatever” is ridiculous — which is true.

Then we have the Substack cohort of former newsmen, including John Harwood and Jim Acosta, both of whom have suggested recently that Trump’s body and brain are both spiraling.

“There’s no question … about his cognitive decline and whether he’s just a man in decline,” declared Acosta, who used to work for CNN. “I think that’s undoubtedly the case. I mean, if we’re not going to believe our own eyes and ears anymore.”

He added, “This is the stuff that they’re waving in everybody’s face about Joe Biden, and Joe Biden was not falling asleep all the time in front of the cameras the way Donald Trump is. I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing.”

Biden did most certainly fall asleep all the time.

Harwood, who used to work for CNBC, added “You’ve got the bruised hands, you’ve got the neck and got the face, one side of the face is sagging.”

“It’s a very dangerous moment,” said Acosta, “that I think we’re in the middle of right now.”

In 2024, at CNN, Acosta promoted the White House’s false claims that all the photos and videos of Biden’s decline were so-called “cheap fakes,” the work of dirty, nameless political operatives working through “right-wing media.”

“We’re hearing about, so-called cheap fakes,” Acosta said. “It’s playing out on right-wing media, Fox, New York Post, and so on. And all of this is to try to make the case that Biden is slipping. He’s confused and so on.”

As for Harwood, he was but one of many newsmen who threw a conniption fit after Special Counsel Robert Hur politely noted that Biden’s brains had turned into mashed potatoes. He was also impervious to evidence after an especially poor, rambling Biden press conference that had been called in February 2024, specifically to dispel concerns about the president’s mental fitness. Harwood declared: “Biden’s press conference showed the same thing his performance in office has shown for three years: He can do the job.”

Even after Biden’s disastrous performance in the June 2024 presidential debate, Harwood was one of the last to keep the faith, writing, “I do not consider Biden cognitively unfit for the presidency. He has been doing the job effectively for more than three years.”

Now is as good a time as any to remind you that even Jill Biden thought her husband was having a stroke during the debate.

Questions about Trump’s age and mental fitness are certainly fair game.

But not from these people. They’re liars, idiots, or both. Either way, their word means precisely diddly-squat. They surrendered all credibility on this issue during the Biden administration, back when they demanded that you doubt the evidence of your own eyes and ears.

You are better off doing what you did back then, tuning them out and trusting your own judgment.

A version of this article appeared originally in the Hill on Aug 31, 2026.

We’re living through a real-life attempt to erase the recent past.

“Woke One was crazy,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) laughed recently during an appearance on ABC News, approvingly quoting a New York City councilman.

“Woke One was crazy. Okay, that’s a truth,” ABC’s Jonathan Karl replied.

The anchor then asked whether the left had gone too far during “Woke One,” including with its calls to “defund the police.”

This is where Ocasio-Cortez — and many within her ideological cohort, whether it’s writers at Vanity Fair or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — want you to accept their version of events over your own memory.

Subscribe now

“I think that during this time and during, especially during Covid, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

She added, “I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.”

Total nonsense.

This is simply part of a larger campaign to rewrite the record, and it’s as brazen as it’s dishonest. It’s also glaringly obvious what it is: a cleanup effort by people with aspirations for higher office. The culture has moved on from the monster that figures such as Ocasio-Cortez helped unleash, and they would prefer to escape culpability. This involves looking you straight in the eye and lying outright about what happened, and about what they did and enabled.

Ocasio-Cortez’s attempt to blame pandemic hysteria for the “woke” era collides with a simple fact: Anyone who is old enough to argue about this lived through 2020 — and 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014. We remember the pandemic craziness as a continuation of a broader craziness that was already well underway. The term “cancel culture” appeared widely in mainstream media around 2018; “woke” itself gained popular prominence in the early 2010s.

There’s also the pertinent fact that “Woke One” was much more than cabin-fever rhetoric. It was often direct action with real, tangible consequences.

As early as 2014, long before the pandemic hit the U.S., “Woke One” was JavaScript co-creator Brendan Eich being forced out as CEO of Mozilla after only eleven days because of a $1,000 donation he had made in 2011 to California’s Proposition 8.

It was a reporter from an Indiana-based ABC News affiliate driving 25 miles to a town of 2,100 just to ask the owners of a family-owned pizzeria whether they would cater a gay wedding.

It was watching a male cage fighter in 2014 compete in a women’s division, and being dared to call his brutalizing of female opponents untoward or cruel.

It was the “Renoir sucks at painting” movement and its effort to cancel the French Impressionist.

It was campus lectures canceled or abruptly ended by the threat or reality of violence.

It was the British government’s agreeing to house male sex offenders who identify as female with actual female prison inmates.

It was the insistence that “drag shows” have always been a licit and beloved part of the everyday American tableau, and that “drag shows” for children were a beautiful and positive development. It was the fanatic promotion of sex-reassignment surgery and procedures for children and teens.

It was the entire news media apparatus agreeing that the hand gesture for “okay” is a secret white-supremacist signal, ensnaring bystanders from West Point cadets to firemen in allegations that they were covert racists.

It was the effort to cancel Laura Ingalls Wilder and Mark Twain.

It was the Seattle school district injecting ethnic-studies questions into all K-12 math classes to “rehumanize” math and teach how it has been “appropriated” by Western culture and used in “systems of power and oppression.”

Then came the pandemic, and “Woke One” was now the effort to cancel Mozart and Flannery O’Connor while removing, dismantling, or toppling monuments to Theodore Roosevelt, the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, and Christopher Columbus.

It was the Smithsonian Institution listing as “aspects & assumptions of whiteness & white culture”: rugged individualism, respect for authority, politeness, punctuality, competitiveness, the nuclear family, objectivity, the scientific method, self-reliance, and hope.

It was Coca-Cola instructing its employees to be “less white.”

It was the curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art being forced to resign for saying he would still collect art from white men.

It was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences being bullied into overhauling its membership and voting rules and Best Picture criteria to meet the demands of the “Oscars So White” protesters.

It was University of Minnesota medical students swearing an oath to “honor all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine” and to fight “white supremacy, colonialism, [and] the gender binary.”

It was fashion magazines insisting that obesity is “healthy.”

It was Dr. Seuss Enterprises announcing it would discontinue six books by the company’s namesake because current leadership had deemed certain images “hurtful” and “wrong.” It was eBay preventing the resale of those six Dr. Seuss books while still allowing the sale of Mein Kampf.

It was Amazon abruptly removing Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment while continuing to sell copies of Mein Kampf.

It was Puffin Books scrubbing words such as “fat” and “ugly” from Roald Dahl’s children’s books, often inserting gentler substitutes of its own choosing. Puffin also replaced terms such as “mothers and fathers” with gender-neutral alternatives, including “parents” or “families.”

“Woke One” also included the moment during the 2020 Minneapolis riots when a career criminal set fire to a building with a father of five still trapped inside, killing him. The Biden Justice Department handed down a mere ten-year sentence, well below the federal guidelines of 17–20 years. In its sentencing memo, prosecutors defended the leniency by quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that “a riot is the language of the unheard.”

It was all of it, before and after Covid-19.

It was “microaggressions,” “cultural appropriation,” parades of activists in Handmaid’s Tale costumes, the heckler’s veto, actual violence, “pussy hats,” and mass censorship across major social media networks. Then it was the “toxic masculinity” of men’s razors, transgender beer, and Land O’ Lakes removing the Native American mascot from its branding (they kept the land, though). It was the fast-tracking of obviously unqualified and dangerously incompetent people into positions of real power and authority, often with devastating consequences. It was taking a knee during the national anthem, “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots, looting, “social justice” scams, and being put in the government’s crosshairs for questioning hyper-racialist curricula or sex-clown story hour for children.

It was also Ocasio-Cortez condemning the inclusion of Saint Damien of Molokai as one of two figures representing Hawaii in the National Statuary Hall Collection.

“This is what patriarchy and white supremacy culture looks like!” she raged in a 2020 video.

Saint Damien was a Belgian missionary who died caring for a Hawaiian leper colony.

“Woke One” was not just Covid-19 hysteria. It was not just rhetoric about making the world a better place.

For roughly a decade, beginning in the mid-2010s and slowing only with President Donald Trump’s reelection, liberals and progressives gorged on identitarianism, making victims of anyone who didn’t indulge their excesses. Across popular culture, politics, academia, and corporate America, they demanded 100 percent participation in their destructive gluttony. Anything short of absolute compliance brought swift personal or professional ruin.

Lives were destroyed, businesses crushed, industries cowed, sectarian violence applauded, iconoclasm encouraged, excellence denigrated, rioting cheered, looting rationalized, free expression censored, dissent punished, art and the human experience cheapened, the bodies of sad and confused teenagers experimented upon, intense racial animus incited, and, in certain cases, people were killed.

A political faction in this country was given carte blanche to enforce its revolutionary vision on every aspect of modern life. It did so with ruthless devotion, capturing every major industry and social institution along the way, and with zero regard for the chaos, destruction, and lasting damage it caused.

It was an era of godless puritanism; except we know it better as the “woke” era. It was not long ago. It was every bit as bad as you remember. And its champions would prefer you forget the worst parts and the role they played — not from any sense of shame or guilt, naturally, but because the culture has shifted and your remembering might threaten their proximity to power.

What — you don’t think they’re actually sorry for what they did, do you?

A version of this article was originally published in National Review on Aug. 18, 2026.

The media-assisted campaign to undermine and delegitimize the U.S. Supreme Court, thus making it ripe for “reform,” continues apace.

Subscribe now

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman last week made an offhand remark in an article about the Michigan U.S. Senate race, writing [emphasis added]: “But because this is the only country I have, because the midterms will be razor close and because I am convinced that two more years of Donald Trump completely unchained — controlling the House, the Senate and tacitly the Supreme Court — could bring about the end of America as we have known it, I have to think about how to make the best of some not great choices.”

What does he mean by “tacitly?” Are we talking about the same court — the one that has ruled against some of the Trump administration’s most treasured agenda items?

Friedman is not alone in his delusions — not even close. It is now practically an article of faith within the liberal commentariat that the Supreme Court is under President Trump’s thumb.

The “carefully manufactured conservative majority,” writes Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce, “remains just as devoted to the money power.” The article’s subhead declares, “The Supreme Court just loves giving our loony overlord whatever he wants.”

“Does Trump basically own the US Supreme Court now?” asked a Guardian headline. Its subhead, “Some are arguing it is now a political institution, not a legal one,” makes clear that the question is not really a question at all, but rather a declarative statement.

Then there is MS Now favorite and Nation correspondent Elie Mystal, who alleges that the Roberts Court is “a rubber stamp for Donald Trump.”

It’s important to note that the court is getting it from both sides. The idea that it’s a failure is shared by both the left and the right, as Trump and his most loyal acolytes regularly assail it whenever things don’t go exactly their way.

Thus a “majority of Republicans think the court rarely or never sides with Trump,” according to Marquette polling data released this month. This is in addition to what we already know: “three-quarters of Democrats say the court often or fairly often sides with Trump.”

Incredibly, even though both sides hold a dim view of the court, Marquette also found that “a majority of the public favors the court’s decision in 11 of 13 cases this past term.”

Yet we see none of this reflected in the discourse surrounding the court. Instead we get Los Angeles Times columnist Jackie Calmes, who said, “But for notable exceptions … the court has mostly inflated this would-be king’s power, blithely trashing long-held court precedents in the process.”

She added, “Besides often siding with Trump in his appeals, the court has favored him in 25 of the 31 cases challenging his actions in his second term.”

This claim, which she attributes to Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky, is highly misleading. The truth of the matter is the executive branch and Trump personally have thus far enjoyed nearly as much frustration as satisfaction from the Supreme Court in his second term.

Of the handful of major decisions related to executive authority that have come down since 2024, Trump prevailed in three (Trump v. CASA, Trump v. Slaughter, and Mullin v. Doe) but lost two (Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. Barbara). In major emergency-docket rulings that’ve likewise concerned the executive branch’s authority, the White House claimed victory in two (Trump v. J.G.G. and Department of Education v. California) but went home empty-handed in two others (A.A.R.P. v. Trump and Trump v. Cook).

No liberal justice crossed over to join the conservative majority in any of the above cases the Trump administration won. Yet when Trump lost cases, conservative justices joined their liberal counterparts in 5-4 and 6-3 decisions and even a 7-2 ruling. Amid all the recent talk of a bought-and-paid-for conservative majority Supreme Court, it’s no small thing that the tradition of Republican-appointed justices crossing the aisle when appropriate, even though liberal justices never do so, continues — just as when Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor and John Paul Stevens sat on the bench.

Then there is the emergency docket, derisively called by some the “shadow docket.” As of this writing, there have been 39 administration-related emergency applications to the court in Trump’s second term, though only about half the cases directly concerned questions of executive power. Emergency applications have generally favored Trump in his second term: of the 35 the administration filed, only about five ended with clear losses.

Yet when we look more closely at what was actually granted, denied, etc., we do not see the Supreme Court expanding the executive’s power but rather reminding lower-court judges of their own limits.

In some cases, the emergency-docket decisions were no more complicated than the Supreme Court informing the lower courts that they lack the authority to block presidential firings of executive branch employees (in Trump v. Boyle and Trump v. Wilcox).

Other decisions held that lower courts have no authority to decide whether the word “temporary” in “temporary protected status” means “permanent” (Mullin v. Doe); that lower courts have no authority to decide which countries may receive temporary protection designations (Noem v. National TPS Alliance); that the lower courts cannot bar federal immigration stops in Los Angeles (Noem v. Perdomo); and that the lower courts cannot dictate the size of the Department of Education’s workforce (McMahon v. New York). Most such decisions, based on our constitutional order and the laws on the books, would not be terribly controversial in a saner world.

A more accurate way to describe the Supreme Court in Trump’s second term would be to call it a mixed bag. The emergency-docket decisions have not favored activist lower-court judges, but Trump has also lost big at the Supreme Court on issues central to his campaign and his presidency — tariffs, birthright citizenship and cuts to billions in foreign aid money going to left-wing non-profits.

Yet for the Thomas Friedmans and Elie Mystals of the world, who’ve made politics their personality, the court is “compromised.” Why? Because activists consider anything less than total victory a defeat. For them, quantity trumps quality.

Thus, the volume of court decisions reining in an out-of-control judiciary outweighs the gravity of the White House’s losses. But seeing only the one while missing the other produces a skewed view of reality — in other words, a Thomas Friedman column.

A version of this article was orginally published by the Hill on Aug. 17, 2026.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey did something remarkable this weekend: it officially grossed more than $1 billion.

Not bad for a three-hour, R-rated retelling of an Iron Age poem.

Yet the two groups one might expect to be most excited by the film’s financial and critical success, the hardcore Right whose chief concern is the preservation of Western values and heritage and the author whose “feminist” translation served as a blueprint for the script, are seething.

There’s just no pleasing people who have chosen politics as a lifestyle.

It’s not entirely surprising that The Odyssey is a runaway success, beloved by critics and audiences alike.

It’s gripping, exciting, and new. From audio to visual, the film does something well worth the price of admission: it marries the ancient with the modern. Just as its score pairs eighth-century B.C. instruments with 20th-century synthesizers, the cinematography pairs the language of the Greek epic with the language of modern cinema. For example: King Agamemnon spends nearly all of his scenes wearing imposing but decidedly non-period-accurate armor. He looks like a Greek Darth Vader. This is by design. Nolan meets the audience where it is and tells a three-thousand-year-old story in a language it understands. Modern viewers know what to feel when they see a Vaderian figure; they know Agamemnon before he speaks.

As for the right-wing holdouts who still insist The Odyssey is “woke” agislop, the film’s themes should have them cheering.

Nolan’s movie argues that civilized society, though imperfect, is worth protecting, as are the laws, traditions, and social contracts that forged it. The alternative is so much worse.

The movie upholds as categorical goods: family, law and order, duty, honor, loyalty, service, chastity, moderation, respect for private property, free trade, tradition, and the examined life. The Odyssey upholds these values while excising the extreme pagan barbarism of the ancient epic, actions as revolting as they are inexcusable to a world that says Anno Domini instead of Before Christ.

Meanwhile, the film identifies as grave, civilization-destroying evils: murder, rape, looting, excess, cruelty, inhospitality, wanton destruction, avarice, cowardice, and treachery. Odysseus specifically bemoans the loss of a high-trust society!

Then there is the Christian imagery that undergirds everything.

“Zeus’s law,” which obviously predates the birth of Christ, is simply the Golden Rule refitted, with characters practically quoting Matthew 25:40 verbatim: “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

To be saved, Odysseus is told he must first pray and repent—not in roundabout terms, but in those exact words. He is freed from Calypso’s island and sails for home only after abandoning the illusion of control and surrendering his life to the divine. When a storm destroys his raft, he does not fight it. Instead, he allows the ocean to take him and wash over him entirely. He wakes on the shores of Ithaca, home at last.

Before Odysseus can end his ten-year estrangement from home and family and free his soul from the weight the audience understands as the guilt of sin, he must go to confession. He does. The film even places a screen between him and his confessor.

Yet even these overtly conservative and Christian elements have not cooled the pure hatred of the weird Right, whose animus predates the film and whose complaints run from costume design to color palette to the script’s use of the modern vernacular.

They say the portrayal of Odysseus as grieved by the Achaeans’ excesses at Troy is all wrong. This might surprise Homer, whose Odysseus weeps in King Alcinous’s court at the retelling of Troy’s fall, his mourning compared to that of a conquered war widow. It’s a scene that has long left scholars asking for whom the tears are intended. The idea of an Odysseus untroubled by the savagery exacted on the Trojans would likewise confuse the ancient Greeks who recount his efforts to have Ajax the Lesser executed for the rape of Cassandra in Athena’s temple.

Their biggest complaint of all is the casting: Lupita Nyong’o, a black woman, as Helen of Troy, and Elliot Page, a biological woman who identifies as male, as the Greek soldier Sinon. Of the two, Page draws the greater ire. Critics cite her presence in The Odyssey as indisputable proof that it’s a Trojan horse (ha!) for a “woke” agenda. This is pure conjecture and ignores what we know: Nolan has a long habit of reusing actors (Page had a lead role in 2010’s Inception); he is among the most conservative directors working today; and the movie has a clearly Christian and conservative message.

We can argue speculation versus fact all day. Better to stick to the film as presented. Disbelief is impossible to suspend for Page’s scenes at Troy; despite the makeup department’s best efforts, it’s impossible not to see the young woman from Juno. Yet Page’s later turn as an embittered shade in Hades is excellent, balancing the earlier, unbelievable scenes. Nyong’o is equally strong in her dual roles as Helen and Clytemnestra.

Praise may be disputed, but that is beside the point.

Disagreement over a performance is one thing. To maintain the movie is “woke” even after audiences can see for themselves that the performances are strong, the casting works, and the story is no left-wing fever dream is simply irrational.

Insisting that the movie is left-wing propaganda is especially silly given Nolan’s evident casting strategy. He did not assemble a generationally and multiculturally diverse cast to preach progressive values to a narrow Western audience. Rather, he built a cast to speak to a generationally and multiculturally broad audience in defense of civilized society. Do you suppose Travis Scott landed the role of Phemius based on his acting talent or because he is one of the biggest music stars in the world? It is obviously the latter. But why do you suppose Nolan wanted a rapper in that role?

As the good Rob George has noted, it seems no accident that The Odyssey stars Batman, Spider-Man, Catwoman, and the Punisher, as well as Spider-Man’s Mary Jane, Doctor Strange’s Clea, Black Panther’s Nakia, and X-Men’s Kitty Pryde, most recently played by Page.

“Rather than asking audiences to forget these actors’ superhero identities, he leans into them. In effect, he’s saying: You already know these faces. Bring those associations with you. Far from limiting these performers, their years inhabiting modern mythological figures become an artistic asset,” George writes. “Audiences instinctively recognize Holland as a plucky youth seeking to live up to the burdens of a missing father figure; Pattinson as a haunted hero, Hathaway as clever and daring, Bernthal as relentless determination made flesh. Nolan isn’t asking viewers to erase those associations. He’s using them as cinematic shorthand to guide audiences into a world of gods, monsters, kings, and epic quests.”

He adds, “That’s more than clever casting. It’s a recognition of how audiences actually discover stories.”

From a black Helen of Troy to a Boston Odysseus, from Academy Award winners to MCU staples to a megastar rapper who can’t act, Nolan cast (ha!) as wide a net as possible with one clear aim: to speak to the old and the young, the black and white, and the Western and non-Western in defense of the laws and virtues that make civilized society as we understand it possible.

A conservative could not hope for better representation in popular culture.

Yet this is where the weird online Right stands: insisting on fiction and inventing new ones.

Some claim Rotten Tomatoes quietly blocks negative reviews. Others claim Page was first cast as Achilles and that an inexplicably “woke” Nolan — who gave the world George W. Bush as Batman — panicked and rewrote the part. Others cheered that The Odyssey, budgeted at roughly $250 million, took only $230 million domestically and $363 million internationally in its first two weeks. (This latter point was stone-cold desperation from the jump. Early projections that excluded China, where The Odyssey opens later this month on roughly 800 IMAX screens, showed it would easily clear $1 billion.)

The right-wing cope runs so deep that when Emily Wilson, whose “feminist” translation helped shape Nolan’s script, condemned the movie for not being progressive enough, parts of the weird online Right claimed victory.

Speaking of Wilson, her review of The Odyssey is so unhinged and incoherent that it nearly outweighs the months of right-wing frenzy.

What a world: A billion-dollar summer blockbuster incorporates her work, removes what she calls the “problematic” and “misogynistic” elements of earlier translations, and stirs excitement for the classics—and she could not be angrier.

That’s the problem with politics as personality: anything short of total victory feels like defeat.

A version of this article was originally published by the Washington Examiner on Aug. 5, 2026.

Anthony Fauci’s recent appearance before Congress is a good reminder that his reign of error would not have been possible without a deeply partisan and starstruck press.

Subscribe now

As Fauci sat last week before members of Congress, pleading the Fifth and wriggling in his seat like a toddler, one could not help but recall that this was the man our news media sold as a living saint, a guardian angel whose competence and motives were beyond reproach.

He was treated as a savior — even as he lied through his teeth.

Fauci said he had “nothing to do” with the disastrous pandemic-era school closures, challenging critics to “show me a school that I shut down.” But his own diary, which, in a classic case of Faucian carelessness, he saved to a government server, reveals the truth.

In now-released personal notes, Fauci boasted of having persuaded New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to close the city’s schools. He also bragged to himself that California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) chief of staff had told him personally that, “based on my TV appearances,” the governor “decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.”

As a consequence, the education and development of countless children was set back; personal livelihoods and thousands of businesses beloved in their communities were also destroyed by decisions that, in many cases, had no scientific basis at all.

Elsewhere, in January 2020, Fauci privately ruled out a Chinese wet market as the source of the pandemic. He wrote in his diary that the market in Wuhan had been “not the source” but merely an “amplifier” of the virus. Yet he would spend the next several years suggesting the opposite, downplaying and dismissing what seems obvious in retrospect — that the virus almost certainly escaped from a Chinese virus lab connected to research funded by the agency he directed. It’s this type of two-faced messaging that has allowed China to escape responsibility for starting, spreading, and trying to cover up the origins of a disease that has killed some seven million people worldwide.

If ever he struggled to reconcile his private beliefs with his public statements, it doesn’t show in his journal. Instead, we get a portrait of a man deeply in love with the idea of himself.

“As soon as people recognized me there was a wave of applause and squealing and screaming and clapping and thanking me with multiple people coming and asking for selfies,” Fauci wrote in his diary in May 2021, adding in the next line, “It was a little bit embarrassing, but it was just a manifestation of how people need a symbol of integrity and truth.”

He also bragged: “The nurses went absolutely wild to see me, they were squealing and laughing and clapping. It was something to behold.”

Earlier entries leave little doubt the man adored the limelight, writing, “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world,” “One person said that Tyra [Banks] was sexy, but I was even more sexy than she was.” and “Over the past three weeks I have been on the cover of Time magazine X2, once as one of the 100 most influential people in the world again as the ‘guardian of the year.’ Also, on the cover of People magazine.”

These notes were written during the years when Fauci’s recommendations ruined lives, drove suicides, and left the elderly to die in isolation.

He even lied about his willingness to testify.

In 2022, he said he was “very happy to testify before any congressional oversight committee.”

“I have nothing to hide,” Fauci said. “I can explain and validate everything that I’ve done. … I’m going to do what I need to do, and that is cooperate fully, because we have nothing to hide at all.”

Last week, during his appearance before Congress, cooperation was the furthest thing from his mind. He invoked the Fifth Amendment roughly 110 times rather than answer questions about his oversight of the federal COVID-19 response.

Though Fauci personally will escape accountability, our press can still be held responsible for how it failed the public: for caving to popular opinion, for promoting narrative over fact, for defending everything he mandated during the pandemic as right, good, and just, for treating any question of his authority as the mark of a heretic, and for getting the story plain wrong.

Certain news outlets assured audiences early that COVID-19 was nothing to worry about.

Then certain news outlets inexplicably agreed to slap the labels “fringe theory,” “conspiracy” and even “racist” on any suggestion that the virus had escaped a lab, even though this was always the most likely scenario. National Public Radio ran a report claiming scientists had “debunked” the “lab accident theory of pandemic emergence.” ABC News baselessly went with this: “Sorry, conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 ‘is not a laboratory construct.’” Don Lemon, at the time a CNN anchor, hosted unprosecuted perjurer James Clapper to defend Fauci’s public, but not private, assertion that the virus originated in nature.

News outlets embraced the Beijing-approved talking point that said it was “xenophobic” to name the virus by its city or country of origin. U.S. newsrooms even degraded themselves to the point of praising Russia’s and China’s obviously bogus claims about driving down infection numbers through ridiculous, cartoonishly authoritarian measures that in real life probably killed far more people than they saved.

“How uncomfortable is it,” asked former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd, “that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this? Meaning, had China been a free and open society, this might have spread faster?” Note that not only were China’s claims about stopping the spread obviously false, but the virus he was referring to originated in and spread to the rest of the world from China.

In what can only be considered a piece of malicious reporting, some hacks even misconstrued the White House’s worst-case projections of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths for the administration’s desired death total.

Perhaps the wildest media failure came in 2021 when the New York Times forced the resignation of longtime infectious-disease reporter Donald McNeil, who had spent decades covering Ebola and other deadly outbreaks. Parents and students on a Times cruise for privileged children reported him for saying the “n-word.” It turns out that McNeil had said it only in the context of asking a student to clarify a question she had posed to him about whether a classmate should be suspended for previous uses of that word. Even after learning that context, editors Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn wrote in a staff memo: “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.”

McNeil was replaced by the younger, inexperienced reporter who undermined the paper’s credibility by claiming that the COVID lab-leak theory was racist.

Six years later, none of these media incidents is any less shameful. Yet despite everything we now know about the pandemic, about Fauci, and about how badly the news media failed, many in the press remain defiantly arrogant, stubbornly defending him as a beleaguered victim of Republican machinations.

“Anthony Fauci’s committee hearing was a spectacle of unchallenged allegations and distorted facts,” the Atlantic complained.

At the New York Times, contributing opinion writer Rachel Bedard called the hearing a “shocking performance,” a “show trial,” and “useless drama.” She characterized Republican Senator Rand Paul as a “contemporary Joe McCarthy” and said Fauci “took abuse… and stayed silent.”

Even at TMZ, which is trying to get back into the political reporting game, Harvey Levin called Fauci’s appearance before Congress “one of the most heartbreaking things” he has seen in government, likening it to the McCarthy-era “red scare.”

Last week, as members of Congress asked the supposed hero of the pandemic, the self-described “symbol of integrity and truth,” to explain his decisions and processes, the former NIAID director refused to respond.

Turns out you can get him to shut up after all.

A version of this article was published originally in the Hill on Aug. 3, 2026.

It is becoming harder to discern whether Zohran Mamdani is a run-of-the-mill political hack or genuinely believes he’s the sovereign ruler of an independent nation-state.

Time will tell, I suppose.

Subscribe now

Last week the New York City leader posted a video to social media, glumly conceding that he does not have the legal authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “war crimes.”

“My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here,” he said. “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”

Well, yes.

Anyone with a basic understanding of U.S. civics could have told him this.

Mamdani went on to urge the federal government “to join the ICC and execute this warrant” and “defend the humanity and dignity of all people.”

Ordinarily one would chalk this up to a shrewd politician’s attempt to save face for a broken campaign promise—a bit of playacted disappointment meant to appease the disheartened faithful. In normal times one would also look back at Mamdani’s election-year promise to arrest Netanyahu and dismiss it as silly campaign slop meant to satiate the glutinous piggies.

But the good mayor, who became a naturalized citizen in 2018, is not normal. It’s getting harder to tell whether he is merely cunning or whether he truly believes that New York City is his to rule, separate from the rest of the Union and unbound by federal law.

Remember: this “arrest Netanyahu” business did not occur in a vacuum.

Mamdani released a video earlier this month countering the White House’s cheery celebration of the Fourth of July and the 250th birthday of America’s founding. Sitting behind George Washington’s desk and flanked on both sides by depressed-looking immigrants, he delivered an address in which he listed and denounced America’s sins.

“As we mark 250 years, what do we see?” he asked. “We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry and oligarchs who buy elections.”

Mamdani added, “We see massed agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans. We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone, and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.”

Counterprogramming the executive branch on the Fourth of July? That is a new one.

This is not something U.S. mayors typically do. It is not something any U.S. leader typically does. It is, however, the sort of thing one expects from one of those child-soldier-backed tinpots who seem to have unlimited free time to produce cheap, homemade footage denouncing the great Satan and so forth.

It’s obvious that, as a key figure in the recent ascent of the democratic socialist wing of the Democratic Party, Mamdani sees himself as a movement leader. This is why he comments constantly on events in which he has no role, power, or oversight, including the Paramount–WBD merger, Graham Platner’s failed Senate campaign, an ICE-related shooting in Minnesota, a shooting in Texas, and anything involving Israel.

Mamdani does not see himself as merely the mayor of New York City. He certainly does not see himself as a local executive whose primary job is the competent and efficient oversight of transit, housing, and basic services.

The mayor sees himself as a leader in national politics writ large. (Too bad for New Yorkers. In exchange for his hyperfocus on the national and international, they get an administration rife with amateur-hour theatrics, including 19 dead after a cold snap, City Hall inexplicably granting press passes to accused murderer Luigi Mangione’s groupies, and the mayor himself explaining climbing rape statistics by saying the current definition of “rape” is broader than in the past.)

But Mamdani’s behavior signals more than an outsized sense of political self-importance. He acts at times like a sovereign whose enclave happens to be located within the United States of America.

Which brings us to the Mamdani administration’s failed attempt to schedule an in-person meeting with Iran’s U.N. ambassador.

In case you have forgotten, the U.S. is at war with Iran.

The State Department intervened and canceled the meeting between Mamdani’s International Affairs Commissioner, Ana María Archila, and the Iranian ambassador. (The Mamdani administration insists the attempted meeting was merely a procedural “error.”)

That the mayor’s team needed to be told at all that it cannot set up independent meetings with delegates from hostile foreign nations is astonishing.

Even more astonishing is that this was not the first meeting nixed by State: it also intervened when Mamdani attempted to schedule a sit-down with outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro. The State Department explained the meeting would violate the narrow terms of Petro’s entry into the U.S. (Petro’s visa was revoked last year following an appearance at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan in which he urged U.S. servicemen to disobey orders and encouraged violence in response to Israel’s war in Gaza.)

As it turns out, the New York City mayor’s office does not have the authority to conduct U.S. foreign policy. That power belongs to the federal government alone.

All of which points back to the larger picture: Mamdani and his camp evidently see him as more than just a mayor. They may even believe that he has power he does not have.

Think of it this way: there is the politician who promises to put a chicken in every pot. We all know the type. There is also the student who genuinely believes he can abolish finals if elected student body president. Most of us have met that type.

Though it is unclear whether Mamdani is the former or the latter, one thing seems certain: he does not consider himself a mere mayor.

That his fiefdom happens to fall within U.S. borders is just a detail.

Remember that period after the 2016 presidential election, when a bunch of reporters convinced themselves that we were entering a new golden age of journalism?

It feels like 100 years ago.

Today, back in reality, the news media rank among the least-trusted institutions in the United States, according to new Gallup polling.

Only 17 percent of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspaper reporting, down one point from last year.

Television news fares even worse, registering at 14 percent. Though this represents a modest three-point increase, it’s nothing to cheer: TV news sits second-to-last on the list, ahead of only Congress, which sits at only 9 percent.

The credibility crisis is even more embarrassing when you realize that both television and newspaper journalism are trusted less than “the medical system” and “banks” — and not by small margins, but by double digits.

Confidence is at or near record lows, and it doesn’t seem we will recover soon.

Even Democrats, the bloc that graded the press most favorably in Gallup’s surveys, rank television and newspaper reporting at only 16 percent and 22 percent, respectively. Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Independents take a much dimmer view. (It may be worth noting that the only institutions where Democratic approval exceeds that of both Republicans and Independents are higher education, public schools, organized labor, and newspapers.)

Can we blame the audience? Can we really say this is anyone’s fault but our own?

Any fair assessment of the current media landscape must acknowledge viewer bias. But bias alone cannot explain the institutional collapse of trust. Audiences have always had preferences. One is therefore forced to confront the possibility that the loss of confidence is largely of the press’s own making. Decades of one-sided, sloppy reporting and a near-total disregard for audience feedback have led us here. If anything, the failings have worsened in recent years.

Subscribe now

Just look at some of the coverage from the past few weeks.

In a story about Republicans who claimed to have spoken recently with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), CNN included a tweet from “Rep. Jack Kimble,” who supposedly represents California’s 54th congressional district and co-sponsored “Poe’s Law.”

Except that there is no House member named Jack Kimble, and California has only 52 congressional districts. Also, “Poe’s Law” is an Internet-era adage, not an actual piece of legislation. “Jack Kimble” is a satirical Twitter account.

CNN didn’t bother to check.

If you missed that one, perhaps you caught when National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg falsely reported that Justice Samuel Alito had announced his retirement. She published an entire pre-write, complete with oddly specific future dates and everything. NPR quickly retracted the story, explaining that it had simply taken the 82-year-old beat reporter at her word. Totenberg later said she had misheard Chief Justice John Roberts, who had announced no such thing.

Speaking of justices, if you watch MS Now, you learned last week that President Trump is largely to blame for the Supreme Court’s recent requests for increased security funding — not the dozens of Democratic lawmakers, left-wing activists, or would-be assassins who have threatened and harassed the justices and their families.

“I do think a big part of it is Donald Trump,” said MS Now contributor Mark Stern, “when he has these fits, like he did after the tariffs decision, where he said that some of these justices should be ashamed of themselves and their families should be ashamed of themselves. … That is a not-so-subtle signal to a lot of angry, violent, paranoid people that they need to take matters into their own hands because Trump’s soldiers aren’t delivering for him. It’s not all Trump, but I do think it’s a big part.”

Except it wasn’t a tariffs ruling that inspired the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It was the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. In fact, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated specifically during congressional testimony last week that the threats and intimidation “were particularly intense a few years ago around the Dobbs leak,” forcing her to wear a bulletproof vest.

But hey — maybe the swatting of Barrett’s family in May was the work of angry importers. You never know!

Even more embarrassing than MS Now’s historical revisionism is the fact that NBC Nightly News skipped Barrett’s and Justice Elena Kagan’s appearances altogether that evening and instead led with a story about explosive diarrhea. There’s an allegory in there somewhere.

Elsewhere, deeper in the gutters of modern journalism, you have the more honest, if depraved, coverage of the threats against the Supreme Court. This includes a piece published last week by BuzzFeed (yes, it still exists) originally titled, “‘My Heart Is With The Women Who Died Because Of Your Cowardice’: People Have No Sympathy For Amy Coney Barrett After She Revealed The Post-Roe Threats She Received.” The subhead added, “I don’t condone violence, but what did she expect when she took rights away from so many in the blink of an eye?”

Believe it or not, Buzzfeed ultimately felt a need to change the head and the subhead excusing violence against sitting justices.

While we’re on the topic of evil people who believe they are morally superior, PBS News also reminded everyone last week that it is not so much in the business of reporting facts as it is in the business of pushing certain narratives by any means necessary, even to the detriment of clear, basic communication.

If you caught PBS’s interview with ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, a biological female, you likely noticed that, like the last Japanese soldier of World War II, the network’s hosts remain fiercely committed to normalizing the chemical and surgical alteration of minors, largely through the strategic deployment of the maliciously evasive euphemism “gender-affirming care.”

What is the average, non-radicalized news consumer supposed to make of this? What is he supposed to do with reports that trade straightforward and honest language for clearly ideological euphemism? With listicles that platform anonymous Twitter users celebrating threats against Supreme Court justices as karmic justice? With outright fabrications about phantom retirements and nonexistent members of Congress? With false claims that the president is largely to blame for the Court’s security needs — easily debunked by a cursory Google search?

Decades of inaccurate, one-sided, false, and often incomprehensible reporting, mixed with insularity and unwarranted self-regard, have produced an industry-wide audience exodus. People are starved for anyone who seems even remotely honest and, above all, normal. This evidently excludes a great many professional journalists.

This is nothing to dismiss or laugh off. Nothing else matters if no one trusts us — and right now, no one trusts us.

The greatest crisis in journalism today is this credibility gap. It isn’t AI or social media. It isn’t the decline of local newsrooms.

Whether we take this seriously will determine whether we serve our purpose or fade into irrelevance. Much of the journalism ecosystem is already migrating to podcasts and Substack. It wouldn’t take much for the broader industry to collapse in on itself, leaving behind a small, largely irrelevant subculture whose only remaining audience consists of those seeking constant affirmation of their increasingly niche political pieties.

A version of this story was published originally by The Hill on July 20, 2026.

Graham Platner’s once-ascendant candidacy for Maine’s U.S. Senate seat collapsed spectacularly last week.

In an 11-minute, self-pitying rant, the self-described communist suspended his campaign, blaming everyone but himself for the half-dozen personal scandals that derailed it. He also announced that he would file the paperwork to withdraw his name by today’s deadline.

With Platner’s exit and Democrats in disarray, one must ask: How did such a comically radioactive candidate get this far in the first place?

Subscribe now

The immediate explanation is that he was granted an unusual amount of grace by party leaders, primary voters, and donors eager for a genuine born-and-bred blue-collar champion in this age of anti-establishment slopopulism.

Yet beneath this lies a less-discussed explanation for his rise and fall: he had help from a credulous media that was all too willing to burnish his completely manufactured workingman persona.

This was at the heart of everything. He could never have achieved the blue-collar image without help from the media, and he could never have gotten so much leeway without the blue-collar image.

You’ve surely heard by now that Platner is an “oyster farmer.” This election may even be the first time many readers have encountered the term “oysterman” in print, let alone several times a week. Outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the New Yorker to ABC News have described Platner in exactly those terms.

Forbes billed him as “Maine’s Oyster-Farming Senate Candidate.” The Guardian called him a “Maine oysterman” who “thinks Democrats are doing ‘jack’ about fascism.”

Even Bon Appétit ran a treacly bit of propaganda titled “For Maine’s Graham Platner, Oysters are Political.” Its subhead claimed that “Working on the water has been instrumental in informing Platner’s anti-oligarchy, economically populist platform.”

This was all very misleading.

The truth is that Platner is more of a boutique hobbyist than what most people would consider a “farmer.” But which title plays better on the campaign trail?

The Waukeag Neck Oyster Co., where Platner took over operations in 2019, generates no real income for him. He says he lives on his veteran’s benefits, collecting free healthcare and approximately $4,800 per month as a “100 percent disabled” veteran. He took no salary from the oyster company last year, saying he reinvests nearly everything back into the company, whose base of operations is a secluded islet privately owned by his friend and business partner.

His 2025 financial disclosures listed just $5,001 in annual “other” farming revenue, and the amount came from a single entity: a “casual fine dining restaurant” and “old world luxury” hotel in Hancock, Maine, owned by his mother.

Interestingly enough, the Waukeag Neck Oyster Co. website domain was not registered until 2024, and the site itself did not go live until January 2025.

In contrast, GrahamForSenate.com had already been registered in 2023.

This information was readily available from the start of Platner’s candidacy. Yet, aside from the right-of-center media, most notably the Washington Free Beacon, many journalists and commentators were happy to be fooled. They applied the “oyster farmer” label quite liberally, as if this were his livelihood and his mother were not his only customer. Outlets from New York to California elevated it far above his less flattering, and frequently ignored, prior career choices, including his time as a Blackwater mercenary.

For his own part, Platner really poured it on thick with the working-class schtick. He said last year, for example, that he couldn’t have purchased his home without the VA's support.

“My wife and I would now be priced out of the town I grew up in,” he said on social media, “like the millions of Americans being exiled from their towns and cities.”

But this also wasn’t so.

Platner purchased his home with a $200,000 loan from his father, Bronson Platner — a former assistant state’s attorney and one-time state senate candidate. (By the way, Bronson Platner’s father was the noted 1960s modernist architect and interior designer Warren Platner. You can buy one of his signature armchairs for the workingman’s price of just $20,000.)

It’s also relevant that Platner’s parents sent him to the Hotchkiss School, an elite private boarding prep school whose tuition (almost $80,000 this year, plus fees) exceeds that of most private universities. He was expelled after only one year for reasons never made public.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is not your average story about a salt-of-the-earth family earning its living off the land or the sea.

The “oyster farmer” persona was a contrived bit of political theater, designed to convince voters and donors that they were getting an authentic working-class candidate.

Affecting an identity to win votes is neither new nor particularly interesting. What is interesting is the number of reporters who, despite having everything they needed to debunk this nonsense, bent over backward instead to spread the “oysterman” myth.

The image promotion Platner enjoyed was such that voters were even asked to accept his blue-collar identity as an excuse for his years of bad behavior and moral failings — everything from a drunk-driving conviction to the alleged physical abuse of one girlfriend.

It almost worked!

Remember, he withdrew only after a second ex-girlfriend accused him of rape. And that allegation came after it was revealed that Platner had maintained an active profile on a hookup app and had exchanged sexually explicit messages with multiple women, even after marrying in 2023, inspiring his former political director to go on the record to warn that something was seriously wrong with him.

Platner’s extramarital adventures came to light after his campaign had already suffered a staff exodus driven largely by the discovery of Reddit posts in which he called rural white Mainers “racist” and “stupid,” declared that “all cops are bastards” (an Antifa slogan) and said he had joined the military “to kill some people.” In another post reacting to footage of a U.S. infantryman being shot and wounded by Taliban fighters, he wrote: “This video never gets old. Dumb motherf—– didn’t deserve to live. At least his stupidity and fat a– wheezing are available for all future infantrymen to witness and hold in contempt.”

And all of the above are in addition to the fact that Platner had a tattoo of an infamous Nazi symbol emblazoned on his chest.

It wasn’t until the rape allegation and a poll showing Platner trailing, not leading, his incumbent Republican opponent that Democrats and left-wing commentators began to demand his withdrawal. Until that point, they had defended and rationalized every prior allegation.

Even when Platner was caught lying about his tattoo’s meaning, many in the press continued to portray him as a good-hearted if rough-around-the-edges laborer rather than what he clearly is: a downwardly mobile, thrill-seeking private-school kid with a rapacious sexual appetite, unregulated emotions, and a towering sense of entitlement.

But then his personal scandals began to outweigh the goodwill that his image had bought him, and the glowing press soon gave way to a thorough examination of his record.

Now, Maine Democrats have no nominee, and national party leaders are scrambling to distance themselves from their former golden boy. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

This was not just the case of a flawed candidate catching fire spontaneously.

The truth is that Candidate Platner was engineered in a lab by overeducated but inexperienced Democratic operatives. They got the blue-collar role-playing part right, but they forgot about the rest of the personality.

Just as Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person, Candidate Platner was a rich person’s idea of a poor person. Thus, the frequent attempts during the campaign to downplay or dismiss his obviously low character and ethical shortcomings with the defense: “That’s just the workingman!” Crazy as it may sound to the modern Democratic operative or the left-wing pundit, not all poor people drink and drive, abuse their girlfriends, or indulge in oddly specific Nazi iconography.

That some in the news and entertainment media chose to embrace the Platner fairy tale even as the truth stared them in the face is an indictment of their judgment, character, and intelligence.

As for the Democratic Party itself, the press’s uncritical acceptance of Platner’s fictional biography represents more than a professional failure. It’s the central reason the party finds itself in its current crisis—and why Republican Sen. Susan Collins will likely win reelection.

A version of this article was published originally in The Hill on July 13, 2026.

For the last decade or so, the press have produced endless handwringing over the rise of President Trump and “MAGA-aligned” Republicans.

They have a point.

What they describe as a “hostile takeover” of the Republican Party is indeed alarming, as the GOP refashions itself into something more like a personality cult.

On the other side of the aisle, the radical progressive and socialist takeover of the Democratic Party is also alarming.

Yet one would hardly know it based on the relatively muted news coverage.

How very odd it is that one fringe takeover should inspire such high dudgeon, while another, though equally serious if not more dangerous, has not.

Subscribe now

The last three years have seen a flurry of activity both inside and outside the political space, suggesting a shift toward ever-more extreme and revolutionary left-wing activity. There have been at least three assassination attempts against President Trump, a targeted political assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk (celebrated publicly by a shocking number of self-professed liberals), multiple deadly or potentially deadly left-wing attacks on government facilities and officers, and actual hostage-taking by anti-Israel student activists.

Meanwhile, in the electoral space, Democratic voters are continuing the trend of nominating socialists for both state and federal office. Avowed socialists now rule Seattle and New York. One of them will soon be mayor of Washington, D.C. — perhaps also Los Angeles.

The swath of socialist Democrats nominated last week in New York — some of them defeating longtime incumbent Democrats — are not just ignorant, inexperienced, and hostile toward the United States as a concept. They are also opposed to the fundamental social framework that makes life in a free society possible. Some of them, for example, do not even support imprisoning murderers and other violent criminals, let alone deporting criminal aliens.

This new breed of Democratic zealot also imposes stringent purity tests on fellow members, demanding absolute fealty to extreme fringe positions that poll at 80-20 against them. Fail to demonstrate the appropriate levels of enthusiasm or, worse, express skepticism, and you can expect a dogpile followed by swift ostracism.

This is not a continuation of Democratic politics in a new direction, but a hostile takeover of a party by revolutionaries who want to scrap altogether its modern center-left ethos.

Outside of conservative media, there have been few, if any, doomsday warnings about this radical new direction — certainly not from the usual suspects who typically warn that anything vaguely conservative, including school board protests or disparaging remarks about biased media, is a threat to the republic.

Among those who won their New York primaries last week was Palestinian-American activist Aber Kawas (D), who has described the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a “manifestation” of America’s systems of “capitalism and racism and white supremacy.” Kawas, a fierce ICE abolitionist, regularly cites her deported father as evidence of America’s “cruel immigration system.”

Her father was deported after he was convicted of fraud and making false statements.

Then there’s Darializa Chevalier, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 13th Congressional District.

On Oct. 8, 2023, long before Israel launched its counterattack against Gaza, Chevalier was marching in celebration of the Palestinian slaughter of Israeli civilians. She has endorsed defunding and abolishing the police, abolishing borders, and “seizing the means of production.” She believes “all deportations are wrong,” even of convicted criminals, and she co-founded a student group dedicated explicitly to “the total eradication of Western Civilization.”

Asked last week to respond to allegations that she is a communist, Chevalier — who has been in college for 14 years — offered up a lot of word salad but did not deny it.

“That framing is one that I’ve been very proud to be able to say I don’t respond to,” she said during an appearance on MS NOW. “One in which I have been very intentional to say I won’t be reactive.”

The New York primaries come after Maine Democrats nominated Graham Platner, a self-described “Antifa supersoldier” and “communist.” Platner helped train the Socialist Rifle Association, a leftist paramilitary group, and proudly, knowingly wore a Nazi SS skull tattoo for nearly two decades before covering it up to run for office.

This is in addition to New Jersey Democrats’ selection of Adam Hamawy from a field of 12 U.S. House primary candidates. Hamawy’s record includes testifying on behalf of the “Blind Sheikh” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and working for an al-Qaida-linked financing front.

Let’s not forget that Abdul El-Sayed (D) is the favorite to win the Democratic primary for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat.

El-Sayed has brought on as a campaign surrogate the internet celebrity Hasan Piker, who believes, among other things, that communism is great, that Mao Zedong did nothing wrong, and that murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson got what he deserved for committing “social murder.” Piker also preaches to his online audience that theft is good and that some Jews are “inbred” and “pig-dogs.”

In related news, recent polling found that liberals are more likely than conservatives to say political violence is sometimes justified. A separate survey also found that only 20 percent of Democrats say they are extremely proud to be an American, compared with 77 percent of Republicans.

Are you getting the picture?

The remaining non-radicalized Democrats are right to be worried.

Both the Republican and Democratic Parties have changed in the last 30 to 50 years. But the new Democrats are quite a bit farther from Bill Clinton than the MAGA right is from Ronald Reagan. Could you imagine Clinton — Bill or Hillary — chalking 9/11 up to “white supremacy?” Or arguing that we should not deport convicted criminal aliens?

Yet, based on the relatively calm and measured news coverage of last week’s elections, you’d think that Democrats were having a normal one.

They are not.

The surge of left-wing socialist types into the political space is surely at least as concerning as the success of Republican candidates who are too slavishly devoted to President Trump.

This is more than just an editorial gripe.

The failure to treat left-wing fanatics for what they are builds a permission structure for such radicals to become even more unhinged and incite others to do the same. There is no real social cost to being a degenerate left-wing dirtbag — not like there is for being the right-wing equivalent.

Former Klansman David Duke was neutralized and boxed out of politics and polite society more than three decades ago after serving a single term in the Louisiana House of Representatives, a seat he won in a special election by just 227 votes. His candidacy for the state-level office drew unequivocal opposition from President George H.W. Bush, former President Reagan, Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater, and Louisiana GOP leaders.

Duke’s term came and went. He has not held office since 1992, but not for a lack of trying.

He began as a pariah, he legislated a pariah, and he has wandered as a pariah ever since, including online, where he is banned from most social media platforms.

In contrast, the domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, who traded bombs for the title of “Distinguished Professor” at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a guest last week at the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center, seated three rows from the former president.

Every major newsroom is still getting mileage out of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, even five years later. For some in the news and entertainment business, it was worse than Sept. 11. Now compare this to the spotty, misleading news coverage last week of the eight members of a North Texas Antifa cell who were sentenced to a combined 450 years in prison for their respective roles in a premeditated ambush and attempted murder of government workers at an ICE detention center.

Chances are, you didn’t even see anything in the news about their botched attack — and if you did, it might have been framed simply as “a protest that turned violent,” which it most certainly was not. PBS, newly liberated from its federal funding, incredibly tried to frame the prison sentences as a Trump administration “crackdown on dissent.”

Political radicalization is political radicalization.

Either we take it all seriously, or we’re not being serious at all.

A version of this article appeared originally in The Hill on June 29, 2026.

Conservative media often criticize the “mainstream press” for getting it wrong, but it is only fair to acknowledge that conservative media get it wrong, too.

And when it comes to President Trump’s disastrous attempt this year at playing war chief, a whole lot of conservatives got it wrong, this author included.

Subscribe now

Following the president’s signing last week of his “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran — a temporary “peace” agreement that gives Tehran everything and the United States zilch — there’s nothing left except to concede that America was done in by a few naval mines. Iran actually forced a desperate White House to the negotiating table simply by flexing what muscles it has left over the Strait of Hormuz. The largest, most powerful, and best-funded military in the history of the world was defeated somehow by a shipping lane.

Our British cousins must be having flashbacks to the Suez Canal.

The most astonishing thing about the White House’s capitulation to Iran, beyond the Islamic Republic’s victory in the face of a clear power disparity, is that it proves the administration jumped into the war with no real consideration or plan for the possibility that its opponent might block the Strait of Hormuz.

This despite U.S. military strategists having warned for decades about this exact scenario.

This is where conservative media, this author included, owe an apology to everybody, most especially CNN.

In March, the cable network published a hard-to-believe exclusive, claiming that “Top Trump officials acknowledged to lawmakers during recent classified briefings that they did not plan for the possibility of Iran closing the [Strait of Hormuz] in response to strikes.”

In response, I suggested that there was “no need to consider the [story’s] sourcing or the outlet” because “this claim is completely unbelievable on its face.”

Even considering Trump’s impulsivity and the general inability of his inner circle to restrain him, it seemed inconceivable that the United States, from the White House down through the Pentagon’s senior leadership, would launch a shooting war with Iran without first establishing a contingency plan for the one thing that every U.S. strategist and defense official has recognized since 1979 as the greatest obstacle to such a conflict.

Boy, was I wrong.

CNN later updated its reporting to explain that “Trump administration officials briefed lawmakers on long-standing military plans to address a major disruption to the Strait, according to one official, but that multiple sources familiar with the session said there was no indication there were any near-term solutions.” I criticized this framing as well, given that the clarification seemed way off from the first claim.

Again, I apologize. CNN was right. I was wrong.

This iteration of the Trump presidency is exactly as inept as advertised.

Everything the U.S. has done in this conflict — from the president’s impotent screaming on social media to the administration’s getting jerked around in negotiations to its eventually agreeing to hand Iran everything — points to one painful and embarrassing reality: The White House went to war with no plan to counter or neutralize Iran’s most important asset.

Thus, after months of military action by the U.S., in which the Iranian navy, leadership, and Revolutionary Guard were reduced to rubble, the White House has signed an agreement that allows Iran to keep its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

The U.S. has also agreed to lift its naval blockade of Iran, to terminate “all types of sanctions,” to waive sanctions on oil sales, and to make “fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” On that last point, it’s important to note that the agreement states explicitly that “such funds, whether retained in the original accounts or transferred, may be fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

In other words, the deal allows Iran, the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism, to designate any beneficiary for the unfrozen funds. Use your imagination.

The White House also agreed to head up a fund with Gulf states to pump “at least” $300 billion into Iran for “reconstruction” and “economic development.”

In return, the U.S. gets little more than Iran’s solemn oath that it will not build a nuke.

The agreement also temporarily reopens the Strait of Hormuz, but only until such time as Tehran decides to shut it down again, because it can do that and there is nothing anyone, not even the U.S., can do about it.

This is key. Don’t be fooled into thinking otherwise.

The agreement has nothing to do with the U.S.’s stated goals at the outset of the war. It has nothing to do with degrading Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The “understanding” is no more complicated than a desperate play to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and toss away America’s leverage to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

It’s a deal so bad that it could only have been devised by the type of man who would lose money as a casino owner.

And if you don’t think the agreement stinks on ice, just remember that when the details first leaked, its architects — most notably Vice President J.D. Vance — claimed the information, which would eventually prove true, was merely “Iranian propaganda.”

It’s a deal so great that its designers had to lie about it.

Meanwhile, Iran still has thousands of missiles, with billions of dollars in sanctions relief coming soon, which will undoubtedly be used to rebuild its arsenal and fund its terrorist proxies.

The memorandum is a humiliation for the U.S.

A theocratic death cult responsible for thousands of dead Americans is being handed everything but the kitchen sink. The only thing the U.S. has to show in return is a document that amounts to an unconditional surrender — that and the loss of at least a dozen U.S. servicemen.

Happy 250th anniversary.

A version of this article appeared originally in The Hill on June 22, 2026.

We’re evidently in the “pounce” phase of Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner’s Hindenburg of a campaign.

We love consistency, folks.

Subscribe now

The funny thing about the “pounce” trope — in which newsrooms divert attention from a Democratic scandal to the Republican and conservative reaction — is that it’s nearly always a dead giveaway that the scandal is indeed … a scandal.

Otherwise, there would be no need to shift focus.

At ABC News, crackerjack correspondent Mary Bruce, like clockwork, accused Republican Senator Susan Collins of “pouncing” on the series of controversies dogging Platner, whom the network correspondent describes as a humble “oyster farmer” who, yes, once had a tattoo “resembling a Nazi symbol.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, not least of which is the insistence that Platner’s tattoo merely resembled the SS symbol rather than being the symbol itself. The tattoo, which Platner has since covered up with a goofy Gaelic dog-thingy, was an exact likeness of the SS “death’s head,” not just a lookalike. Furthermore, former acquaintances and text messages from before the tattoo became public knowledge claim that he was aware of the image’s meaning as far back as 2012 and referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”

Then, of course, there’s the insistence on characterizing Platner, whose academic background includes attendance at an elite prep school with tuition currently ranging from about $71,000 to $80,800 per year, as the mild-mannered “oyster farmer,” with no mention of the fact that his customer base is essentially just his mother.

More than all of this, though, is the laughable suggestion that there is anything notable or even untoward about the Collins campaign’s pointing out that her opponent in the 2026 midterms is a too-online sexpest edgelord with no impulse control.

This is not “pouncing.” This is called campaigning.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

And when life gives you an opponent who once sported a Nazi tattoo, whose fondness for dating apps and hookup sites followed him into his marriage, who has published a series of psychotic opinions and statements that would make even President Trump blush, and who has a string of ex-girlfriends who allege physical and emotional abuse, you cut a campaign ad.

Collins’s team would be guilty of political malpractice if they didn’t point out that their boss’s knuckle-dragging opponent appears to have been plucked straight from the Paleolithic Era.

Yet, if you can believe it, Bruce and ABC are hardly the first to accuse those wicked Republicans of noticing what the Maine Democratic candidate has said and done.

In response to reports that Platner had sent racy text messages to women who are definitely not his wife, the New York Times reported gravely that “officials with the campaign arm of Senate Republicans seized on the news, circulating reports and attacking Mr. Platner.”

Then, in reaction to a report detailing allegations that Platner was abusive toward ex-girlfriends, The Guardian likewise noted with sadness, and perhaps a tinge of indignation, that “Republicans [had] seized on the latest report.”

In reference to the full body of scandals and controversies created by Platner, The Hill reported last week that “Republicans have pounced on the string of controversies in the lead-up to Tuesday’s primary.”

Even after Maine Democratic Governor Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign, Politico reported that Republicans had “seized on” her exit “to question Platner’s blue-collar bona fides and highlight his past scandal.”

Emphasis very much added.

The “pouncing” trope is funnier than usual in the context of the Maine Senate race because of the implicit, if not explicit, suggestion that it’s unfair to dig into a Senate candidate’s past.

Are the folks at ABC News, the New York Times, Politico, etc., unaware of what goes on in regular campaigning?

Are we really going to pretend that bringing up Platner’s own words and deeds is somehow unusual in U.S. politics or dirty pool?

Apparently — but that’s not all!

The trope is doubly absurd in this specific scenario, given that it comes after the 10-plus years of press-sponsored moral panics about “white supremacy,” “toxic masculinity,” and how everything from milk to birdwatching is rooted somehow in racism and fascism.

Yet now that these people are faced with something more concrete than their own bogeymen — a U.S. Senate candidate with an honest-to-goodness Nazi tattoo and a body of aggrieved women — they’d like very much for everyone to look the other way.

They’d like it even more if the Republican senator from Maine would cease her seizing.

A version of this article appeared originally in National Review on June 14, 2026.

CBS News fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley last week following alleged clashes with management.

Like Pelley, the firing itself wasn’t particularly interesting.

It was the reaction that stood out.

Subscribe now

Most notable about the conniption thrown by journalists and a considerable number of elected Democrats was that it was the latest in a larger tantrum that has run uninterrupted since October 2025, when a lesbian Obama-Democrat, Bari Weiss, took over as the network’s editor-in-chief.

“Scott Pelley told the truth,” ex-ABC News correspondent Terry Moran, who was himself fired for unprofessionalism not too long ago, claimed without evidence. “So, CBS News fired him.”

Speaking in reference to the recent editorial hirings and firings at CBS, former 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft said, “I think it has been disastrous for the show, for the audience, which is not insubstantial.”

What this long-running “outrage” reveals, what with its boilerplate rhetoric about oligarchies and its vague, specifics-free allegations of wrongdoing by Weiss and 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton, is that many people in the news business view their profession as something akin to a public university.

They don’t think of themselves as beholden to public opinion, market demands, or even basic workplace professionalism. Rather, they see themselves as a necessary pillar of civilized society, and you all could be a little more grateful for their service.

This upside-down view goes a long way toward explaining how the credibility gap, the single greatest threat facing journalism today, has gotten so wide.

Sloppy and one-sided reporting helped to crater trust, yes, but the problem has also been aided enormously by the industry’s move toward contemptible insularity, detachment, single-mindedness, and total self-regard.

Weiss is obviously trying to run CBS as a business, one with broad appeal and thick profit margins. This means updating, adjusting, and modernizing an organization whose workplace culture is still proudly stuck in the 1960s.

Running a successful newsroom today also means accounting for the credibility crisis, which makes sense given that it is the most pressing issue.

No one trusts us. Naturally, this is a problem.

Without trust, there’s no audience; without an audience, there’s no point.

How do you serve the public interest if you have no public? For that matter, how can you afford to keep the lights on, let alone afford to produce quality journalism, if there are no customers?

As obvious as this seems, there are those in the press who, like public educators, view change, especially change in response to industry-wide failures, as a threat to their comfort, their careers, and their preferred politics.

Oh, they’ll say their opposition is motivated by the sincere belief that the free press is too sacred to have to address matters as pedestrian as “market forces” and “audience disapproval,” but their resistance is rarely any deeper than professional self-preservation; they’re fighting for perks, good salaries, and the freedom to indulge their partisan preferences in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

We see this in the Pelleys and the NPRs of the world — those who’d like to enjoy all the benefits and prestige of major-league journalism with none of the market pressures or business concerns, and certainly none of the personal moderation such things require.

They recoil at efforts to impose accountability or any suggestion that they give fair consideration to opposing perspectives held by the other 50 percent of the country, crying about the sanctity of the First Amendment and editorial independence.

They’ve become so accustomed to a version of the news industry that operates like a public university -- where revenues are unconnected to performance, where a captive audience is a given, where viewpoint conformity is ruthlessly enforced, where loyalty is rewarded with lifetime employment, and where criticism is worthy of attention only if it comes from within the institution -- that even the suggestion of operating under a for-profit business model has them breaking out in hives and leaking to competing newsrooms.

But a news network is answerable to more than a board of trustees, and it’s an irony that the public university–style approach to journalism is how CBS arrived at its current predicament.

Like many legacy newsrooms, CBS has taken its audience for granted, viewing them not just as an afterthought but as something of a nuisance. Unfortunately for corporate media, this attitude is no great secret. Audiences are keenly aware of the press’s dismissiveness, especially when it comes to viewer concerns and criticisms, worsening the already serious credibility crisis.

There’s a reason an astonishing 94 percent of U.S. news consumers believe it is important for “people to do their own research to check the accuracy of the news they get,” according to recent Pew Research Center data.

This skepticism did not appear overnight.

It is a direct result of how the industry has operated over the past 50-some years.

So now that organizations such as CBS have new, younger management who recognize the credibility crisis, longtime staffers are being asked questions such as: “What can we do differently to appeal to the widest number of viewers?” and “How do we win back trust?”

But rather than answer these questions, CBS’s entrenched veterans have mounted a months-long internal revolt, complete with leaks from staffers upset that anyone would dare to ask them what they do during work hours.

Pelley’s firing is just a microcosm of a larger story playing out in media, where legacy brands — those gargantuan dinosaur networks — have yet to recognize or concede that their ideal of modern journalism has very little in common with reality.

Whether the old guard likes it or not, our news media are in a transitional phase, driven by technological change and exacerbated by audience distrust (a feeling that increasingly appears to be mutual). Old assumptions about how the business works no longer hold.

Remember: Bill O’Reilly hosted the top-rated show on Fox News for two decades, earning as much as $25 million annually. Then, in 2017, he was replaced overnight by Tucker Carlson, who delivered comparable ratings for significantly less money.

Everything is up for grabs. Everyone is replaceable.

The savvy journalist understands this.

The same apparently can’t be said of Pelley, who cut his teeth in journalism in an era that predates the invention of the Post-it note.

This isn’t a gratuitous dig. Pelley is 68 years old. He was born the year the Soviets hurled Sputnik into the stratosphere. In contrast, Weiss is 42 and Bilton is 49. Forget Sputnik. Three of the four Space Race presidents were already dead by the time they were born.

Moreover, the average age in the 60 Minutes audience is 65, which is not ideal for the show’s long-term prospects.

If you don’t think the age gap and audience demographics played a role in Pelley getting the heave-ho, you’re fooling yourself. It has played out exactly thus in newsrooms across the country, with the possible difference being that Pelley’s purported unprofessionalism likely made management’s decision easier than most.

When you hack your way through all the self-glorifying language about “our democracy” and the sacredness of journalism, you’ll find at the bottom of everything that this is a business.

Pelley and his entourage of apparent superfans in the House and Senate Democratic caucuses may not like it, but it’s true, and a business isn’t like a public university.

This is the private sector. They expect results.

If we’re going to spend the next five, ten, or 20 years investigating the radicalization of young men and women, we may as well also study the radicalization of the news media, because whatever happened to the BBC demands a thorough review.

Subscribe now

For years now, the state-funded outlet has drifted further to the fringe left (“left” by U.K. standards; by U.S. standards, it’s Pravda with its pinkie out).

But last week the BBC outdid itself, publishing a feature that, through unrelenting emotional manipulation, tried to cast the Afghan men who sell their preadolescent daughters into slavery and child marriage as sympathetic characters, while portraying austerity-minded U.S. legislators as villains.

If that’s not a radicalized way of looking at the world — choosing, out of sincere reverence for the church of multiculturalism, to blame Western conservatives for the matter of child brides rather than those arranging the marriages for profit — I don’t know what is.

“Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices,” the report’s original headline read.

The story opens with local color, painting a familiar tableau of poverty and desperation. “My children went to bed hungry three nights in a row,” one Afghan man told the BBC. “My wife was crying, so were my children. . . . I live in fear that my children will die of hunger.” The report cites United Nations figures showing that three in four Afghans cannot meet their basic needs and that 4.7 million are one step from famine. The story then swings back to on-the-ground accounts, quoting a choked-up father: “I got a call saying my children hadn’t eaten for two days. I felt like I should kill myself.”

For more than 500 words, readers are immersed in anecdotes about fights over food, desperation, tears, threats of self-harm, pity, and grief, all clearly designed to generate sympathy for these Afghan fathers.

It’s only after all this — roughly a third of the way through the 2,000-plus-word article — that the authors finally address the headline’s shocking claim. Only now do we learn that the men the BBC has spent more than 500 words asking us to grieve with are, in objective terms, evil. We learn that these men are not just “selling children,” but specifically selling their preadolescent daughters as domestic slaves and child brides.

If you feel contempt for the BBC for stringing you along, just wait. It gets worse.

The report continues:

Abdul Rashid Azimi takes us into his home and brings out two of his children — seven-year-old twins Roqia and Rohila. He holds them close, eager to explain why he’s making these unbearable choices.

“I’m willing to sell my daughters,” he weeps. “I’m poor, in debt and helpless.”

“I come home from work with parched lips, hungry, thirsty, distressed and confused. My children come to me saying ‘Baba, give us some bread.’ But what can I give? Where is the work?”

Abdul tells us he is willing to sell his girls for marriage, or for domestic work. “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years,” he says.

He hugs Rohila, kissing her as he cries. “It breaks my heart, but it’s the only way.”

The BBC then tries to soften the horror of what the reader has just absorbed — the complete commodification of female children by their own fathers — by chalking it up to a mere difference in cultures:

The choice to sell daughters over sons is because, culturally, sons are widely seen as future breadwinners. In Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s restrictions on education and work for women and girls, this is even more pronounced.

Additionally, there is a tradition in which a marital gift is given to the family of the girl from the family of the boy during marriage.

In the universe of evil euphemisms, saying “marital gift” in place for “cash for little girls” has got to be right up there with “gender-affirming care” instead of “mutilation of prepubescent bodies”

Still, there is more.

One subject, Saeed Ahmad, self-pityingly recounts how he hawked his five-year-old daughter because he couldn’t pay her medical bills (she had appendicitis and a cyst in her liver). The little girl is sold to a relative and expected to marry one of his sons when she turns ten. The BBC none-too-subtly emphasizes that the buyer is a relative, as if to reassure readers: “It’s not as if she was sold to a total stranger.”

In reality, the fact that the buyer is a relative makes it even more grotesque. On top of being the type of people who buy and sell children — relatives, at that — the men profiled in the report are evidently also the type who refuse to help family members during a time of famine and destitution. How are we supposed to feel reassured about the child’s purchase when the buyer chose to bid on her rather than help cover her medical costs?

The obvious conclusion this information forces the reader to draw — that these are bad men making evil choices — is likely why the story pivots suddenly to its “real” villain: the Trump administration, which cut as much as $500 million in aid to Afghanistan in 2025.

It’s only later in the report, after all that setup, all that emotional manipulation, and all that criticism of the White House, that the BBC half-heartedly and begrudgingly concedes that the Taliban also bear some responsibility for the suffering of the Afghan people.

What happened to the BBC?

The story of Afghan suffering deserves telling, but it requires uncompromising journalism. It requires the kind in which the BBC refuses to engage—either for fear of blaspheming “diversity” at home or for a fervent belief in the righteousness of multiethnic “inclusivity. A journalist unencumbered by a devotion to either would have included every voice in his reporting, not just the self-pitying Afghan fathers. And, boy, do we hear plenty from the fathers. We hear their thoughts; we read about their tears and their woes. We also hear a great deal from the BBC itself.

Yet, we hear nothing from the mothers. We hear nothing from the buyers. We certainly don’t hear anything from the tiny human beings who are being traded from man to man like cattle. Better journalists would have spoken not only with the fathers but with those who suffer the consequences of their choices. Better journalists would’ve also asked at least a few questions of the men who buy five-year-old girls, even if those people refused to comment.

There was a time when Englishmen such as General Charles Napier, William Sleeman, and Winston Churchill called evil by its name, with no thought of cowering behind the soft pillow of moral relativism or an all-consuming fetish for the ethnic. The English once possessed the will and moral clarity to force an end to barbaric foreign practices, such as sati, and to meet third-world thuggery with overwhelming force.

Now, British state-sponsored media cannot even bring itself to criticize the Afghan men who buy and sell preadolescent girls as slaves and brides.

The sun must set on everything, including an empire that at one time knew nothing but light. The BBC isn’t unique in its decay, it’s just a symptom of England’s overall rot.

It’s all profoundly sad. Then again, should we really be surprised that the organization that protected Jimmy Savile for so many years would also shed tears for the men who sell their children into bondage?

A version of this article appeared originally in National Review on May 24, 2026.

A New York Times columnist who specializes in maudlin first-person grief porn outdid himself last week.

He published an article alleging that Israeli officials have trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

Subscribe now

Crucially, the Times’ Nicholas Kristof, who has a long history of playing the dupe, offered nothing to substantiate the shocking allegations beyond the word of Palestinian activists and wartime propagandists.

Equally important, the Times’ news side has yet to cover or confirm Kristof’s story. Whatever standards may apply on the paper’s opinion desk, its newsroom has yet to see anything convincing enough to repeat the charges formally.

A more charitable soul might give Kristof and the Times the benefit of the doubt. We are neither so charitable nor is the Times, or Western media writ large, deserving of any such courtesy.

Especially not when it comes to the war between Israel and Hamas.

In the three years since the horrific Oct. 7 massacre of Israelis, we have watched in astonishment as the most absurd and outrageous allegations against Israel have wormed their way into Western print. We have been subjected to unbelievable and sometimes obviously false claims, parroted verbatim by journalists who are either the world’s most gullible or its most immoral people — or both.

There has not been a charge too stupid or too obviously implausible for Western newsrooms to repeat, so long as it is aimed squarely at Israel and its military.

And when it comes to coverage of the Middle East and lapping up allegations that should trip every nonsense detector, Kristof is no pioneer. His dog-rape charge might be the worst of the worst, but it is hardly a first.

Recall the scramble by Western media to accuse Israel of bombing Al-Ahli Hospital and killing more than 500 civilians. The New York Times itself rushed out a headline that read, “Israeli Strike Kills Hundreds in Hospital, Palestinians Say.”

The allegation was suspicious from the start, especially given the preposterous speed with which the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry supplied news outlets with that 500-plus figure. Subsequent analysis revealed that there was no airstrike on the hospital; an errant rocket had detonated in a nearby parking lot. More importantly, it was the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and not the IDF, that had fired the rocket.

The Times eventually amended its breaking-news headline to “At Least 500 Dead in Strike on Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say,” and then amended it again to “At Least 500 Dead in Blast at Gaza Hospital, Palestinians Say.”

The paper later conceded that its initial reporting “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas” and “left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was.”

What’s the world coming to when you can’t take a stone age death cult at its word?

The Washington Post, meanwhile, was a bit too eager to report that Israeli troops had killed “over 30 near U.S. aid site in Gaza.” The Post walked back its reporting, amending the headline to “More than 30 killed by gunfire near U.S. aid site in Gaza” and affixing a lengthy editor’s note that read, in part, “The early versions fell short of Post standards of fairness and should not have been published in that form.” Speaking of the Post, it once accused Israeli officials of forcing Palestinian mothers to shuttle back and forth between Gaza and Israel without their newborns, all to satisfy onerous permit requirements. But no such rule exists. A 230-word editor’s note now acknowledges that the story’s authors, who relied entirely on claims from Palestinians and pro-Palestinian sympathizers, never contacted Israeli officials for comment. The Post also published a separate report claiming that the IDF had targeted a Doctors Without Borders convoy; a correction now states that those involved in the attack never blamed Israel for the attack.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the BBC falsely reported that IDF troops had targeted “medical teams as well as Arab speakers” when they raided al-Shifa Hospital, which Hamas was using as a dual command center and prison for Jewish hostages. The BBC later issued a written and on-air correction and apologized for the falsehood.

Then, of course, there’s Reuters, which retracted a story that had incorrectly identified a victim of a Palestinian terrorist attack as a member of Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency. The victim was not and never had been a Mossad agent, something Reuters might have discovered had its reporting not relied solely on input from the family of the Palestinian killer.

And let’s not forget the New York Times front-page story on Gaza starvation, which prominently featured a photo of the emaciated child Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq. “He was born healthy,” the photo’s original caption read. The original version of the feature story also quoted the boy’s mother as saying, “Mohammed … was born a healthy child.”

The emaciated child is not a victim of wartime starvation. He suffers from severe cerebral palsy, neurological and muscular disorders, and other conditions that predated the war. The Times removed the mother’s quote and the photo caption and added an editor’s note revealing that it hadn’t bothered to confirm the child’s condition or medical background prior to publication.

“Had the Times known the information before publication,” the note said, “it would have been included in the article and the picture caption.”

Well, yes—asking questions before publication is generally the order of events in journalism.

As bad as you might think this wartime coverage is, remember that it’s nearly as bad, if not worse, in peacetime.

In 2015, the BBC reported straight-faced on Hamas’s claim that it had seized an “Israeli spy dolphin” off the Gaza coast. Earlier, CNN had publicized Sudanese claims that it had captured an Israeli “spy vulture” on a reconnaissance mission.

The BBC also ran a headline in 2010 titled “Shark attacks not linked to Mossad, says Israel,” while the Telegraph reported “Shark ‘sent to Egypt by Mossad.’”

Earlier, in 2009, the Guardian went all-in with the headline: “Israel admits harvesting Palestinian organs.” The paper ended up changing the title to “Doctor admits Israeli pathologists harvested organs without consent.” It also added a lengthy editor’s note explaining that the practice, which had begun and ended in the 1990s, had been performed on Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians, and foreign workers alike.

What was the point of the original headline if not to incite ethnic and religious violence?

Is it possible that Israel, the militarily dominant power in this conflict, is abusing its lopsided advantage and inflicting grievous punishments and cruelties upon the Palestinian people?

Certainly.

Anything is possible in war, especially when one side boasts overwhelming firepower.

Should you believe the umpteenth extremely dubious report alleging comically evil behavior by Israel?

Absolutely not.

Not for any potential antisemitic reasons, but because the benefit of the doubt was squandered long ago on lurid and sleazy allegations that proved ultimately unfounded or outright fabricated.

The smartest thing you can do now is this: believe it when you see it. The say-so of activists and their unbelievably gullible (or complicit) counterparts in the West is hardly sufficient — unless you enjoy being manipulated.

Subscribe now

There is no version of the Supreme Court that the political left will accept that is not explicitly and exclusively aligned with Democratic Party priorities

In their minds, it is either a court of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson-types advocating for the most obviously unconstitutional policies that favor Democratic power, or the court is illegitimate and anti-“democracy.”

Never mind the conservative justices’ histories of voting with the court’s liberal bloc — a phenomenon that goes the other way much less frequently. Never mind also that this court has ruled many times against the Trump administration’s executive overreach.

For liberals, it’s all or nothing.

Subscribe now

We’ve seen this narrative play out these past several years. When Democratic lawmakers and activists are not outright mischaracterizing Supreme Court rulings in ways that come just shy of libelous, fringe left-wing commentators, who are increasingly the mainstream of the liberal commentariat, are calling for the court to be reformed, packed, or for conservative justices to be impeached.

Just look at the wild-eyed reaction to the court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The justices ruled 6-3 that Louisiana had acted outside its legal authority when it gerrymandered a congressional district along racial lines. Put more simply, the Supreme Court held that legislators cannot engage in race-based gerrymandering because such practices are themselves a form of racial discrimination.

That seems straightforward enough. Yet, based on the press coverage, you would think that the court had repealed the 14th amendment.

“The Supreme Court struck down a majority black congressional district in Louisiana, weakening a landmark voting rights law’s protections against discrimination in redistricting,” declared the Associated Press.

Reported NPR: “The U.S. Supreme Court strikes another severe blow to the Voting Rights Act.”

“US Supreme Sourt ‘demolishes’ Voting Rights Act,: said the Guardian, “gutting provision that prevented racial discrimination.”

The accompanying media commentary was also exactly what you’d expect.

“The Supreme Court Has Completed Its Quest to Kill the Voting Rights Act,” wrote the Nation’s Elie Mystal in his typical apocryphal style.

At the New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie argued it’s racist to disallow race-based gerrymandering.

“Allowing for racial gerrymandering, as long as there’s some fake leaf of neutrality, is basically the way Jim Crow worked,” he moaned.

Not to get too far afield from the main topic, but weren’t we just in the middle of a national conversation about how gerrymandering is bad? Are we now introducing the idea of good gerrymandering?

As for the New York Times itself, its editorial board argued last week that the Supreme Court justices “acted as partisans in the voting rights ruling.”

Then there was ex-MSNBC presenter Medhi Hasan, who repeated the well-worn call for the court to be demolished — I mean reformed: “If the Democrats don’t make rebalancing and expanding the Supreme Court a top priority for whenever (if?) they next get into power, then I don’t know what to say anymore. The GOP-packed court is the biggest block on progress in this country and has been for a while.”

But the reaction last week was only partly about the ruling. If the histrionics felt a bit flat, or if you suspected critics were mostly going through the motions, that’s because they were. It is not so much the ruling they object to as the Supreme Court itself.

From the moment the Supreme Court gained a conservative majority in 2020, Democrats and left-wing commentators have been waging a non-stop campaign to delegitimize it. There wasn’t even a honeymoon period. Allegations of tyranny and illegitimacy have been the reflexive response to every decision from this court, regardless of the legal merits.

Even if they believed the court had gotten Louisiana right, they would never admit it. They can’t let up. The campaign to undermine and overthrow the independent judiciary requires a relentless barrage of slanders, innuendo, criticism, and hand-wringing. Any suggestion that the court is not made up of devils would undermine this years-long, all-hands-on-deck effort.

Thus, we now have liberal justices breaking precedent and publicly disparaging their conservative counterparts. We had a Supreme Court staffer leak the highly controversial Dobbs decision, which prompted violent protests and even an assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Speaking of which, all this talk of so-called “reform” and court-packing comes after the intensive effort to destroy Kavanaugh personally — an effort run in the same style as the campaigns that derailed the nominations of Robert Bork and Miguel Estrada and nearly destroyed Clarence Thomas.

The effort against Kavanaugh also came within the context of the highly orchestrated, and sometimes left-wing-funded, media campaigns to discredit Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito with spurious allegations of far-right sympathies and too-cozy relationships with billionaire Republican donors.

What’s especially remarkable is that this effort to undermine and tear down the entire institution comes after liberals enjoyed decades of judicial victories in the Supreme Court — thanks in large part to the long-running trend of Republican-nominated justices siding with the court’s lockstep liberal bloc.

And the Democratic-nominated bloc really is in lockstep compared to its conservative counterpart. For 40 years, it has been clear that Republican-nominated justices are more likely to peel off and side with the liberal bloc than the other way around.

Today’s court is as conservative as it has been in about a century. Since that time, Democrats have both dominated the court and enjoyed all the benefits of moderate Republican-nominated justices crossing over to rule in their favor.

But now there is no impressionable Anthony Kennedy, no pliant John Paul Stevens to go along with the rest of the liberal bloc. Now that Justice Thomas has at least one more justice who will vote with him as reliably as Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor vote with each other — well, now we have to rethink the entire judiciary!

It’s no accident that every swing vote on the court these last 40 years was a Republican nominee.

This is because liberals don’t believe in moderation.

It’s either their way, or the whole business is illegitimate.

This story appeared originally in the Hill on May 4, 2026.

Subscribe now

Nearly as great a problem as left-wing violence is the left’s refusal to admit it has a problem.

You’ve likely encountered this brand of ideological intransigence over the past decade. You’ve probably heard some variation of it from a co-worker, a friend, or even a family member.

Subscribe now

When a Republican or conservative is shot, stabbed, or beaten by a left-wing assailant, the activist left adopts one of three standard responses:

The first: The violence is deserved. He had it coming! The second: It didn’t happen. It’s a hoax! The third, and by far the most common, is: Right-wing violence is still worse.

Of the three, the third is the most annoying, not just because it’s raw whataboutism, but because the counterexamples offered are often mischaracterizations or outright falsehoods.

They will stake out any of these three positions rather than engage in introspection. Anything to deny legitimacy to the idea that conservatives deserve dignity, sympathy, or even empathy. To grant any of these would be to concede that conservatives are human. But in the universe of left-wing activism, the right is evil incarnate. It can never be victim, only culprit. That’s why, in the wake of any violence directed against Republicans or conservatives, even when it is explicitly left-wing, the hardcore left, including certain elected lawmakers, will do anything to avoid admitting their side has a violence problem. Though this is partially intellectual cowardice, it’s mostly just a refusal to humanize the victims. The hatred runs that deep.

Let’s look at what happened last weekend.

A left-wing would-be assassin tried to murder President Trump during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

This marked at least the third such plot against the president. An earlier attempt by a possibly apolitical gunman involved shots fired directly at the president’s head, with one clipping his ear. This is deadly serious business.

In a normal world, we’d be having one of those national conversations we hear so much about. We’d be discussing the (apparently) normalized left-wing position that the U.S. president deserves to die. We’d be talking about left-wing radicalization, with members of the Democratic Party themselves offering solutions.

But we don’t live in that world. We live in the one where the left and its leaders won’t even admit they have a crisis of radicalization, let alone commit to addressing it.

We live in a world where a Bernie Sanders volunteer can try to murder the Republican congressional caucus, including now–House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.), who very nearly died in the attack, and an MSNBC anchor will go on television a few days later to argue that, based on his voting record, the congressman is no sympathetic victim. (He had it coming!)

We live in a world where a too-online trans “ally” can shoot Charlie Kirk in the neck, and a left-wing Washington Post columnist will share fake racist quotes attributed to the late conservative activist while smugly suggesting that he lived by hate and died by hate. (He had it coming!)

Speaking of assassins’ bullets, we also live in a world where Trump can survive a sniper attack, one in which a man was killed, two others were gravely wounded, and there’s even a picture of the bullet flying just behind Trump’s bloodied head, and 46 percent of Democrats and Kamala Harris voters will believe the incident “was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him.” (It’s a hoax!)

We also live in a world where, even when the violence is undeniable and the perpetrator’s motives clear, your standard leftist will simply shrug and assert that right-wing violence is still worse.

You can have multiple presidential assassination attempts; the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the murder of Kirk; multiple shooting attacks on ICE facilities; a violent, weeks-long siege of a federal courthouse in Portland; “social justice”-themed riots of all shapes and sizes; and nearly 100 crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life groups vandalized or firebombed since the 2022 Dobbs decision, to name just a few, and the response from dedicated leftists will still be: I don’t care; the right is worse.

After this latest attempt on Trump’s life, and after conservatives and Republicans asked whether we could talk now about left-wing radicalization, the usual suspects at once invoked their trusty “whataboutism” card featuring the same trusty cast of characters: Paul Pelosi! Gretchen Whitmer! Gabby Giffords! January 6! Melissa Hortman!

Pelosi’s assailant, anti-war and nudist activist David DePape, who had been homeless and mentally unstable at the time of the attack, was registered with the Green Party as recently as 2014. He later got into Covid-19 vaccine-conspiracy theories, 2020 election trutherism, and “Pizzagate”-style theories about child-trafficking, making him nearly indistinguishable from your run-of-the-mill left-wing Epstein conspiracy enthusiast.

The Whitmer kidnapping plot admittedly has more legs as an attempt at “whataboutism,” but it’s impossible to ignore that the entire ordeal was a goofier version of The Man Who Was Thursday, where the number of undercover informants -- at least twelve -- nearly equaled the number of actual plotters, 14. Of the 14 charged, five were acquitted after the defense successfully argued entrapment by the FBI. Also, we should point out that the kidnapping plot, which never advanced past the plotting stage, is a weird comeback to incidents involving actual, flying bullets.

Giffords’s assailant, Jared Lee Loughner, is a paranoid schizophrenic. There has never been any credible link between the attack in Tucson and right-wing political ideology, because the gunman has no political ideology.

As for January 6: Yes, riots are bad. You’ll find no defense of them here. Unlike our counterparts, whose views on violence are entirely situational, we’ve maintained this position consistently — whether for the 2021 Capitol riot or for the “fiery but mostly peaceful” race riots that occurred between 2014 and 2021 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Charlotte, Chicago, Ferguson, Kenosha, Memphis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle, St. Paul, and Washington, D.C. We opposed them most recently in 2025 during the anti-immigration enforcement riots in Los Angeles, which the usual suspects predictably characterized as “largely peaceful.”

Then, of course, there’s the late Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman, the left’s preferred go-to example of a dead lawmaker these days. (The recent reflexive invocation of her murder is particularly gross, so you’ll forgive me for being blunt.) Like the Whitmer kidnapping plot, this example has more legs than most left-wing “whatabouts,” but it still comes with some caveats.

Hortman and her husband, Mark, were murdered in June 2025. Their alleged killer, Vance Boelter, is a Trump supporter. He is anti-abortion. He voted in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. He also claims he is a secretly trained military assassin.

When he was apprehended, he had anti-Trump paraphernalia as well as a hit list featuring the names of Democratic lawmakers and abortion providers.

It’s worth pointing out here that one of Hortman’s final legislative acts was to side with her Republican counterparts in repealing taxpayer-funded health insurance coverage for adult illegal aliens. It’s also important to note that Boelter wrote a letter addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel claiming he “was trained by U.S. military people off the books starting in college.” Boelter also wrote that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz wanted him “to kill” Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith because the governor “wants to be a senator.”

“I told Tim I wanted nothing to do with it and if he didn’t call off that plan I would go public,” the alleged gunman wrote. “He said he would call it off or hurt my family if I didn’t play ball.”

Boelter clearly doesn’t seem to be playing with a full deck. But never mind all that. Democrats have a dead lawmaker, and by God they’re going to make the best of it.

Charlie Kirk murdered by a pro-trans ideologue who claimed he wanted to stop the young conservative activist from spreading “hate”? Melissa Hortman! President Trump targeted for assassination by a Reddit-speaking left-wing dork? Melissa Hortman!

It’s no exaggeration to say the left seized on Hortman’s murder purely as a defensive mechanism. They’re not so shaken up by her death as they’re interested in using it as a bludgeon against the right.

A review of Google Trends shows that interest in Hortman spiked sharply after her murder and then flatlined in the months that followed, only to see an even sharper spike after Kirk’s assassination. Interest in Hortman saw a second sharp spike after this latest assassination attempt on Trump. In between those two incidents of violence against Republicans, online interest in Hortman cratered.

Put more simply, they put her away when things settle down and trot her back out whenever anyone rightly notes that the left has a radicalization problem. Rinse and repeat. (Should we really be surprised that the pro-Hamas wing of U.S. politics would use Hortman as a human shield?)

This habit of foisting questionable or outright flimsy examples of supposed right-wing violence is a favorite tactic of Democrats and those within their ideological orbit. You’ve probably heard by now mentions of a study by the Anti-Defamation League claiming that the right is responsible for nearly all political violence since at least 2015. This claim is true — if you believe, as the study’s authors do, that prison gangs and prison-gang-related violence should be lumped into the “right-wing” column while no other group is held similarly responsible for either type of violence. Like the examples involving Paul Pelosi and company, the study’s central thesis works only if you massage the details.

But if you have to fudge the numbers, do you really believe what you’re saying?

Speaking of fudging the numbers, another viral left-wing response to the latest Trump assassination attempt has been to invoke the “eleven” such attempts against former President Obama.

Eleven attempts? I don’t recall even one serious attempt aside from the ricin letter and those bullets shot into the White House while Obama was en route to Hawaii. I don’t recall ever seeing Obama crouched low and hustled out of an arena or ballroom by swarms of security guards. I certainly don’t remember anyone ever jumping security barriers and rushing Obama on stage.

Then you dig into the list of the “eleven assassination plots” invoked by wingers such as former HuffPo senior political reporter Laura Bassett and one-time media darling and failed congressional candidate Rebekah Jones, and you find that the list includes, among other things, a plot to use a death ray on Obama and lots of talk from people who never made it out of the plotting stage.

But if we’re using these kinds of examples as the measure, wouldn’t Trump still have far more threats, especially considering he has been directly targeted by Iran?

This is stupid.

There’s no need to compare who has been threatened more. These people do this only because it allows them to talk around the fact that the left is home to people who’ve taken concrete action to kill a Republican president. One would like to believe that half-decent leftists are at least a little uncomfortable with recent polling showing that 42% of self-identified liberals believe political violence “can sometimes be justified” while separate polling found that 55% of those left of center said assassinating Trump would be “at least somewhat justified.” But given everything we’ve seen these past two decades, this seems like an increasingly unreasonable hope.

Amid all the deflections and even defenses of left-wing violence, you’ve probably heard well-meaning people seek the polite but false position that “both sides” have a violence problem.

This “pox on both houses” attitude is ignorance if not outright cowardice.

There is right-wing violence, certainly. But what makes for the false equivalency, aside from the difference in volume, is that nearly everyone recognizes this about the right, nearly everyone condemns it, and nearly everyone works to mitigate it.

Left-wing violence, by contrast, enjoys implicit or even explicit support from the very institutions designed to maintain social order, from academia to the news media to the judiciary. And that’s if they acknowledge the violence at all.

Paul Pelosi’s attacker rightly felt the full weight of the law: he is now serving life without parole. Meanwhile, a pair of left-wing attorneys who firebombed a police vehicle during the George Floyd riots received little more than a slap on the wrist. The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were hunted down and the book was thrown at them, while the Portland insurrectionists were rewarded with a glossy fashion spread in the Washington Post.

They’ll look you square in the eye and tell you the Capitol riot was an act of “domestic terrorism,” and then complain it’s “not fair” to highlight the destruction and looting involved in “mostly peaceful” left-wing riots.

And anyway, those stores that were burned and looted had property insurance, right? The U.S. Capitol can also be rebuilt thanks to the largesse of the American taxpayer, but that’s not exactly the point, is it?

Ask any ordinary Republican legislator how right is too far right, and he’ll give you names: Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, etc. Demand that a Republican apologize for acts of right-wing violence, and he’ll almost certainly do it. As for the conservative commentariat: it’s still locked in a yearslong civil war over who should be admitted into the tent.

Meanwhile, you can’t get Democrats to condemn even a nepo-baby streamer who believes, among other things, that communism is great, that Mao did nothing wrong, that the murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson got what he deserved, that theft is good, and that Jews are “inbred” “pig-dogs.” These same people aren’t even embarrassed to support a Maine Senate candidate who, until very recently, had an SS “death’s head” tattoo prominently displayed on his chest.

In the wake of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in which one woman was killed, Republicans wasted no time condemning far-right extremism and violence. You barely even had to ask. The irony now is: If it’s true, as the Justice Department alleges, that the Southern Poverty Law Center had a hand in organizing the rally, it means that Republicans will even apologize for left-wing-involved extremism!

Meanwhile, the left-wing base is over here holding the dual positions that the most serious attempt on the president’s life was faked, but that if it had been real and succeeded, it would have been “at least somewhat justified.”

The problem with the left is that they won’t even admit they have a problem. And as we all know, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

Instead of that national divorce we keep hearing about, maybe we should first stage a national intervention.

This article appeared originally in National Review on May 3, 2026.

—

This article has been updated.

Journalism is about sharing plain facts as clearly and as widely as possible.

Its great enemy is euphemism.

No one wants to waste time decoding deliberately deceptive language or reading between the lines just to understand the basic facts. Unfortunately, everyone is being forced to do both nowadays.

Subscribe now

Just look at the New York Times and Associated Press’s coverage of a recent child abduction case. The FBI arrested the father of a 10-year-old boy on charges of international parental kidnapping. But because the accused identifies as transgender, the corresponding news coverage is filled with pronoun-respecting activist-speak—the kind that undersells the story, muddles the who’s who, and even turns the accused into a sympathetic character.

For a story involving such a serious allegation as this one, the Times headline quite nearly framed the FBI as the bad guys: “U.S. Sends Plane to Cuba to Get Child in Transgender Custody Case.” The AP chose: “Trump administration flies 10-year-old back from Cuba amid custody fight involving gender identity.”

Neither headline is false in the strictest sense, yet both are masterpieces of evasion.

The story is not so anodyne as a mere custody dispute, nor is it about the Trump administration meddling in “gender identity” issues. It’s about a divorced father allegedly kidnapping and smuggling his 10-year-old son out of the country in flagrant violation of custody laws.

Unfortunately, to understand the facts of the case, readers must first hack through a thicket of “she-her” pronouns in reference to the father and various “they-them” circumlocutions.

Here are the facts: A biological male once known as Eri Ethington fathered a son with his then-wife. Shortly after the birth of their child, Eri began living under the name “Rose” and identifying as transgender.

A few years later, according to Rose’s brother, the transgender father began advocating for his son to undergo transition surgery. The boy’s mother opposed it, leading to a bitter divorce and a shared-custody agreement.

The son, now ten, currently identifies as female.

Earlier this year, Rose and his new partner, Blue Inessa-Ethington (formerly Carly Ann Crosby), told the boy’s biological mother that they were taking him on a camping trip to Canada, according to an FBI affidavit.

A hotel was picked out, and a campsite selected. The trip was scheduled to wrap up by April 3, at which point the son was supposed to return to his mother. April 3 came and went, and the mother hadn’t heard anything, even though her son had phoned on March 28 to tell her that they had arrived in Canada.

The mother tried to contact her ex-husband, but both Rose’s and Blue’s phones were turned off. All calls went directly to voicemail, according to the affidavit. The mother then contacted police.

Instead of the proposed camping trip, Rose and company had fled from Canada to Havana.

Family members told investigators they believed the son might be in danger, citing long-standing concerns that Rose had already manipulated the child into denying his biological sex. One family member also expressed concern that Rose might have fled to Cuba to subject the boy to gender-reassignment surgery — something Rose had been advocating for since the child was five years old.

An FBI search of the couple’s home uncovered handwritten to-do lists, including “learn Spanish” and “empty USU bank,” and notes that read, “10k withdrawal — cash to have,” and “10k emergency.”

Blue withdrew $10,000 from her checking account on March 26.

Investigators also recovered notes with instructions from a therapist in Washington, D.C., directing the transgender father to send the therapist $10,000 and providing guidance on “gender affirming medical care for children.”

Investigators determined later that Rose had quit his job; Blue had stopped communicating with her employer.

Based on the “extensive planning and preparation” documented by law enforcement officials, wrote the FBI affiant, Rose and Blue were likely not planning to return to the U.S. at all.

On April 13, a Utah court granted the mother sole custody and ordered the boy returned immediately.

Cuban authorities found Rose’s group shortly thereafter and turned them over to U.S. officials, who had arrived in person for the handoff. Rose and Blue were deported aboard a Boeing 757, arrested upon landing in Richmond, Va., and arraigned the same day.

The boy is safely back with his mother. The criminal case is now pending in federal court in Utah.

Even a Muppet could follow this plot.

Yet despite what seems like a straightforward criminal allegation, the Times and the AP are framing the story as a gender-identity case, in which the Trump administration is cruelly denying a child “gender-affirming care” (or whatever we’re supposed to call it now that the lawsuits are rolling in).

This is on top of the fact that the reports refer to everyone exclusively as “she,” “her,” or “they,” which is indefensible from the standpoint of clear reporting, given that half the people involved in this case are biological males.

Which “she” is speaking and which “her” is plotting? The father? The mother? Or the father’s new partner? The 10-year-old son, by the way, is identified only as “the child” or “they.”

Particularly strange is the media fixation on the gender-reassignment angle, which comes from a single line in the affidavit. This modest detail, which the Justice Department presented as merely a theory posited by a worried family member, gets outsized media play as the central theme of the story.

The case “appeared to touch on a major policy issue for the Trump administration: cracking down and restricting transition surgeries for minors, procedures that the administration has characterized as ‘surgical and chemical mutilations,’” reports the Times.

Meanwhile, the AP dedicated the final four paragraphs of its story to detailing the Trump administration’s efforts to “cut off … gender-affirming care for minors,” while assuring readers that “gender-affirming surgery” for children in the U.S. is “rare” and that Cuba would never consent to it under such circumstances.

But of course, the defendants in this case likely did not flee to Cuba because it’s especially pro-transgender or because it offers state-funded reassignment surgery. They probably chose Cuba for its lack of extradition agreements with the U.S. You can’t enforce U.S. custody law in a country that doesn’t recognize U.S. law at all — or at least, that’s how the thinking goes. It didn’t quite work out that way in practice.

It would be nice if some of these news outlets expressed half as much alarm over the alleged international kidnapping scheme as they do over the Justice Department’s effort to bring a child, so badly treated, home to his mother.

A version of this story appeared originally in the Hill on April 27, 2026.

You have to give CNN’s Brian Stelter this much: Nobody is as reliably wrong as he is.

That counts for something, right?

Subscribe now

On April 13, the self-appointed public relations agent for the news industry gave it a metaphorical pat on the back, crediting investigative journalists with forcing disgraced Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) to scuttle his gubernatorial campaign and resign from the House of Representatives after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and assault.

“Eric Swalwell ending his bid for California governor is, among other things, a testament to the power of investigative reporting,” Stelter boasted.

It is not.

No one comes away from this story looking good, least of all members of the press. It’s a scandal, in fact.

The accusations against Swalwell are as serious as they get. The alleged misconduct, which Swalwell denies, spans more than a decade, stretching back to at least his first term in Congress in 2012. Worst of all, journalists and insiders in Washington, D.C., and California now say they first heard rumors about the congressman’s secret life years earlier.

Gee, fellas. A decade-plus is an awful long time to sit on an allegation stretching from the nation’s capital to the Golden State.

“Rumors about Eric Swalwell’s sexual misconduct have swirled in D.C. for years,” said former Axios reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian. “I first heard these rumors in 2020, in the course of my other reporting about Swalwell. I was neither a politics reporter nor a women’s issues reporter, so I could not chase them down.”

She added, “I very much wanted to report it out myself. But #MeToo stories on the Hill aren’t related to my beat, as much as I personally wish I could report them out. I passed the tip along to colleagues on the Hill beat.”

For the record, there is no rule in journalism preventing a reporter from pursuing a tip simply because it drifts slightly outside his or her beat, though some newsrooms are stricter than others in this respect. Allen-Ebrahimian’s explanation is especially puzzling when you remember that, in her role covering China, she was one of the Axios reporters who broke that Swalwell was the target of a Chinese honeypot scheme. She was already in the general neighborhood, and a follow-up investigation would’ve remained within her lane.1

California politics insider Steven Tavares offered a similar account: “I’ve covered Eric [Swalwell] since he was a member of the Dublin City Council. Shortly after being elected to Congress in 2013, his behavior towards women was known by all levels of our local government and the Alameda County Democratic Party.”

Then there’s this curious 2017 tidbit from CNN: During the height of the #MeToo movement, the network reported that “more than half a dozen interviewees independently named one California congressman for pursuing female staffers.” CNN chose not to name the lawmaker or pursue the claims further, citing a lack of verification.

Five women have now accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct. One allegation involves strangulation and rape. Three women describe “blackout” experiences.

It’s difficult to square the caution that the press exercised for Swalwell with the recklessness with which it pursued the thin and obviously dubious allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

We all remember the confirmation hearings, when newsrooms such as CNN eagerly platformed even the most outlandish claims.

Our media has a two-tiered system of standards. It had no problem legitimizing even anonymous allegations against Kavanaugh but shied away from reporting the far more credible allegations against Swalwell, claiming a lack of corroborating evidence (they also didn’t have corroborating evidence in Kavanaugh’s case, but no matter!).

It’s really as simple as selective caution, and one can’t help but notice to whom the courtesy is extended.

Lastly, as far as crediting investigative journalists with Swalwell’s downfall goes: Be serious.

We recognize an opposition-research dump when we see one.

The press didn’t suddenly crack the Swalwell story; it languished for years despite being what reporters themselves called an open secret. The information surfaced only when Swalwell complicated the Democratic Party’s odds in the California gubernatorial race.

We can venture a pretty good guess as to what happened: Democratic operatives fed reporters the dirt.

Party strategist Michael Trujillo claimed as much:

One note on the Swalwell stuff — (this isn’t confirmed) but a reporter with Politico was working on verifying the rumors on Swalwell when he was running for President. (He’s no longer with the publication.) Two days before he was scheduled to sit down with this reporter Swalwell dropped out of the race. The energy disappeared to potentially take him out, the victims if they were even willing to go on the record never did. He slithered back to his safe house seat. December 2025 was too early to take down Swalwell we had to wait til his paperwork was ALL IN running for governor March 2026, so the head of the snake could be chopped off and he had no safe house seat to slither back to this time. Hate the strategy fine, but for folks unsure if this would work, we had to make sure he couldn’t get away like he did in 2020.

Naturally, take Trujillo’s account with a grain of salt; strategists spin for a living. Yet his version of events fits the pattern.

Reporters claim they had heard rumors of Swalwell’s misconduct for years, yet they did nothing. Suddenly, when the party needed Swalwell gone, the story materialized.

We’ve seen this sort of thing before, most recently with the White House press corps pretending not to notice that former President Joe Biden’s brains had turned to mush.

It’s a stutter! Those are cheap fakes! He’s as sharp as a tack!

Then Biden himself removed all doubt as to his mental acuity, or lack thereof, and the same press decided all at once that the truth of Biden’s decline could no longer be ignored. Never mind that the about-face coincided exactly with Democratic power brokers reaching the same conclusion.

From dismissing concerning videos as “cheap fakes” to hawking books about how everyone knew Biden was a dotard, and the only thing that changed in that time was the opinion of Democratic leadership.

Similarly, the press simply couldn’t report on this Swalwell business until it suddenly “could.”

The congressman’s ouster isn’t a story of investigative journalists doggedly pursuing a difficult story and performing fearlessly in the face of powerful opposition. It’s a story of Democratic operatives forcing oppo down reporters’ stupid, pliant gullets, like geese being fattened for foie gras.

A high-profile member of Congress allegedly drugged and raped women and somehow got away with it for more than a decade, through the #MeToo era and even a presidential campaign. Until now, reporters just couldn’t report the story, even though they claim they knew Swalwell had a reputation as a creep and predator. The press couldn’t lock it down, choosing instead to demonstrate a level of responsibility that was wholly absent for the duration of Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Then Swalwell becomes a problem in the California gubernatorial race, and the next thing you know, those rumors no one could confirm suddenly appear in print.

All it took was seven terms in Congress, nearly a half-dozen victims, and possibly one spiked investigation in 2020.

Hooray for journalists indeed.

A version of this story appeared originally in National Review on April 19, 2026.

In the last decade or so there have been at least a half-dozen such cases. Once or twice might be bad luck — more than that, however, and it begins to look like a trend.

Subscribe now

On April 7, the FBI arrested the 40-year-old Williams and charged her with transmitting classified information to Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Harp. What’s especially striking about this story, perhaps more striking than the leaks themselves, is the simplicity with which Williams was caught.

Harp had previously named his source in his reporting, quoted her at length, and, in some instances, used her likeness, such that federal investigators needed only to skim his reporting to find their culprit.

Harp maintains that his source “committed no crime,” which is interesting considering Williams told him specifically in 2025 that she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.”

Even wilder than Harp having led the FBI directly to Williams is that hers is not an isolated instance.

In 2018, the FBI arrested and charged former special agent Terry Albury for having passed classified intelligence to the Intercept. The bureau caught Albury with relative ease, largely because the news outlet itself had filed unusually precise Freedom of Information Act requests for the very papers the special agent had already given them. The requests contained exact document titles and details unavailable to the public. When the bureau later examined its own records, it found that Albury had accessed more than two-thirds of the documents highlighted by the Intercept’s reporting, and that he was the only agent to have done so while copying and pasting portions of the digital intel.

Albury pleaded guilty in 2018 to violations of the Espionage Act and served a little more than two years in federal prison.

Speaking of the Intercept, it had already been down this road, before the Albury incident.

In 2017, it published the details of a classified intelligence report on Russian election interference. The information had been mailed to the paper by then-NSA contractor Reality Winner.

To verify the intel, Intercept editors sent copies of the leaked information to the NSA. Unfortunately for Winner, the copies and photos shared with federal sources carried a multitude of clues as to the leaker’s identity — printer tracking dots and telltale creases revealing that the documents had been printed, folded, and carried out of a secure building. Investigators needed only a few days to connect the dots.

Winner confessed, was charged under the Espionage Act, and received a sentence of five years and three months.

There are additional, albeit lesser, examples of this sort of thing in media, including when James Wolfe, the longtime director of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was sentenced to two months in prison for lying to FBI agents during an investigation into whether he had leaked classified information to a BuzzFeed reporter with whom he was having a not-so-secret extramarital affair. There is also former Defense Intelligence Agency counterterrorism analyst Henry Frese. Federal investigators caught him with ease, because it took practically nothing to figure out that he was the source of the classified information that appeared in his live-in girlfriend’s reporting for CNBC.

If you’re willing to look back a bit further, there is also the 2012 David Petraeus scandal. The former general and CIA director was caught sharing classified intelligence with his jealous mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell, after she sent threatening, anonymous emails to a friend of the Petraeus family. The emails triggered an official FBI cyberstalking investigation, which ultimately exposed that the married general had been feeding classified information to his married pillow mate.

Aside from the obvious reminder that one shouldn’t sleep with one’s sources, there’s another thought: As a journalist, one ought to try, at least, to make it more difficult for investigators to pinpoint one’s sources.

Are they not teaching this anymore in J-school?

Law enforcement and counterintelligence investigators aren’t idiots, and it doesn’t take a Columbo to figure out that the reporter publishing leaked intel is probably getting her information from the boyfriend with the security clearance.

It is a good thing that men and women still come forward when they believe something gravely wrong is being done in secret. We should not wish to discourage them.

It is also a good thing that not all whistleblowers are so unlucky as the ones mentioned above. But when journalists repeatedly make it easy for investigators to determine the sources of leaks, whistleblowers may begin to think twice — not about speaking, but about to whom they speak.

A version of this article appeared originally in the Hill on April 13, 2026.

If you get the feeling legacy media aren’t being straight with you, that’s because they aren’t.

Nowhere is this clearer than in their coverage of illegal immigration, where pertinent details are routinely obscured or buried in favor of naked appeals to emotion.

Subscribe now

Consider the opener to a recent New York Times report, titled “TSA Tipped Off ICE Agents Before Arrests at San Francisco Airport.”

“The woman and her nine-year-old daughter were walking through Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, heading to their gate to fly to Miami to visit a relative, when a stranger in plainclothes approached,” the paper reported. “Minutes later, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was on her knees, crying, as two immigration agents were handcuffing her in front of her daughter, according to video footage that went viral this week.”

It’s not until 14 paragraphs in, exactly halfway through the article, that the Times bothers to report the woman has had a final order of removal against her since 2019. Read a little further, and you’ll learn that the order was issued after she skipped her immigration hearing.

What is this information doing so far down the page? Shouldn’t the “why” of the woman’s arrest appear much earlier, nearer to the who, what, where, and when?

This style of coverage, where crucial information appears far below human-interest-heavy headlines and ledes, is hardly unique to this one Times report. When it comes to covering illegal immigration in the U.S., hiding the ball is practically standard operating procedure. The practice has become so widespread that it’s hard to believe it’s accidental.

At NBC News, we learn about Emerson Colindres, a deported 19-year-old whom the network calls a “teen.” We learn that he is a soccer phenom whose classmates call him “one of the greatest players [they’ve] met on the field.” We learn that he “dreamed of continuing his sports career and hoped to attend a university.” We learn he was a “law-abiding high school student”; that he “did amazing academically”; and that his “coach, teachers, classmates and teammates — all called for the release of a beloved teenager who they said was unfairly ripped away from their tight-knit community.”

We even hear from a middle school teacher who calls his deportation “devastating.”

It is not until the 27th paragraph of a 46-paragraph story that NBC reveals this key detail: “The family’s hopes for a future in the U.S. took a hit after an immigration judge denied their asylum application and in 2023 they were given a final order of removal.”

This fact, oh-so-neatly tucked away, seems more relevant to Colindres’s deportation than his report card or soccer skills.

Also at NBC, we read about a “73-year-old Bay Area woman” whose recent deportation was “devastating” (that word again!) for her community. We learn she was arrested even after she “complied with immigration officials for more than a decade.” We learn her arrest “sparked protests from those in her community.” We find out that around 200 people gathered near her neighborhood to “call for her release, carrying signs that read ‘Hands off our grandma’ and ‘She’s no criminal.’”

It’s not until later that we discover the “Bay Area woman,” an Indian national, entered the U.S. without documentation around 1992, claimed asylum, and lost her case. Later still, readers learn that a federal judge issued a final removal order against her in 2005 and that her last appeal was denied in 2013.

At CNN, we learn about Humberto Martinez, the deported patriarch of “a proud military family” — a family that, as the network puts it, has been torn apart by Trump’s immigration policies and war with Iran. It’s not until the ninth paragraph that we learn he “was issued a final order of removal in 2013 and was removed to Mexico for a fifth time after being taken into ICE custody.”

This style of reporting is a choice.

There’s nothing wrong with human-interest fluff — people love that stuff, and that’s why morning shows still exist. There’s also nothing wrong with being opposed to the current administration’s approach to the enforcement of existing immigration law.

But in terms of half-decent, informative news reporting, favoring emotional fluff over legal facts in stories about law enforcement specifically is more than just poor editorial judgment — it’s intentional misdirection.

It’s also going to get much worse before it gets better.

If you thought the growing credibility gap between audiences and the press would force the latter into some sort of recalibration or introspection, then brother, you’ve got another think coming.

On March 25, after covering the murder of Loyola University Chicago student Sheridan Gorman, the university’s student newspaper issued a groveling apology for referring to the accused killer as an “illegal immigrant.”

“That language does not align with Associated Press style, nor does it align with the values of this newspaper,” reads the submissive mea culpa. “No human’s existence is illegal, and we quickly changed our wording to reflect that. We acknowledge the harm such language can cause.”

They say the kids are our future. If there’s any truth to that aphorism, and if this miserable student rag is any indicator, then the future of American journalism is unimaginably bleak.

A version of this article appeared originally in the Hill on April 6, 2026.