It’s a dirty trick. The people who spent fifty years overturning old assumptions now accuse anyone who objects of being a radical. The accusation is repeated so often that it has almost become accepted without examination. But conservatism, properly understood, isn’t a radical philosophy. It’s almost the opposite. It’s an argument for restraint, continuity, ordered liberty, and respect for institutions that have survived because, more often than not, they contain wisdom we didn’t invent. There’s nothing radical about believing parents should have the principal role in raising their children.

There’s nothing radical about believing men and women are different, that borders ought to be enforced, that criminals ought to be prosecuted, that the government should live within some reasonable relationship to its means, or that citizens should be free to speak, worship, work, own property, and raise families without constant interference from Washington. Those weren’t fringe ideas when most of us were growing up. They were ordinary American assumptions.

What changed wasn’t conservatism. What changed was the country around it, and especially the institutions which shape our politics, culture, education, entertainment, and public life.

For years, the political Left has pushed one boundary after another. Each new demand was presented as modest. We were told that nobody wanted to go any farther. Then, once the new position was established, the next demand arrived, and anyone who still defended yesterday’s consensus was treated as though he had wandered in from some dark corner of history.

We’ve watched it happen on marriage, sex, and gender. Barack Obama opposed same-sex marriage when he first ran for president. Hillary Clinton did too. That wasn’t considered radical or hateful at the time. But the argument didn’t stop with civil marriage. It moved into disputes over whether religious believers, bakers, photographers, adoption agencies, schools, and other institutions could be required to participate in conduct that violated their convictions.

Then came gender ideology. Americans were first asked to accept that sex and gender were separate concepts. Then we were told that men could become women. Then males began competing in women’s sports. Bathrooms, locker rooms, school policies, pronouns, and children’s education were pulled into the debate. People who said biological sex is real suddenly found themselves treated as if they were making some shocking new political claim. In truth, they were saying what nearly everyone in America had said without controversy a generation earlier.

Who radicalized whom?

The same thing happened with immigration. There was once broad agreement in both parties that a sovereign nation had a right to control its border, enforce its laws, deport people who entered illegally, and expect newcomers to assimilate into the country they chose to join. Democratic presidents said those things. Democratic senators voted for enforcement measures. None of it was considered extreme.

Over time, however, ordinary immigration enforcement came to be described as cruel. Deportation became morally suspect. Sanctuary cities grew to be fashionable. Illegal entry was often discussed as though it were merely an administrative inconvenience, while Americans who objected to millions of unlawful crossings were accused of fear, prejudice, or worse. Eventually, a demand for a secure border became the radical position.

Race followed much the same course. The great moral victory of the civil-rights movement was the rejection of the idea that Americans should be judged by the color of their skin. The aspiration was equal citizenship, equal protection, and a country in which race mattered less, not more. Yet over time, large parts of the Left moved away from that ideal and back toward racial categories, racial preferences, racial quotas, racial guilt, and the constant sorting of Americans into oppressors and victims according to ancestry and skin color. Then, we were told that colorblindness itself was suspect, that institutions should treat people differently in the name of correcting past wrongs, and that children should be taught to understand themselves through racial identity. Conservatives who still believe the law should treat every citizen as an individual, without favor or penalty because of race, are now sometimes described as the extremists. That’s an extraordinary reversal of the principle Americans were once taught to admire.

Crime followed the same path. Americans once understood that one of government’s first duties was to preserve order. Police were supposed to arrest criminals.

Prosecutors were supposed to prosecute them. Judges were supposed to impose sentences authorized by law. Then came campaigns to defund police departments, eliminate cash bail, decline prosecution of entire categories of offenses, reduce penalties, and treat enforcement itself as part of the problem.

People saw what followed in city after city. It’s becoming a nightmare. Stores locked ordinary merchandise behind plastic. Businesses closed. Families changed where they walked, shopped, and spent time. When voters finally demanded more police, more prosecution, and more accountability for repeat offenders, they were told they had moved to the extreme right. They hadn’t. They had simply grown tired of an experiment they never asked for.

Education has traveled the same road. Parents once assumed that sending a child to public school didn’t mean surrendering authority over that child’s moral upbringing. Then parents began discovering controversies over race, sexuality, gender identity, pronouns, school libraries, parental notification, and what teachers were able to discuss with young children. When mothers and fathers began showing up at school-board meetings and demanding answers, much of the political establishment acted as though the parents were the problem.

But the parents hadn’t suddenly changed. The institutions had.

The same is true of free speech. Older liberals once regarded free expression as almost sacred. They defended offensive speech because they understood that the First Amendment means very little if it protects only popular opinions. Somewhere along the way, that tradition weakened. Universities began shouting down speakers. Employees lost jobs over political opinions. Social media companies became more aggressive in policing disputed claims and political debate. Activists began describing speech itself as a kind of harm.

Conservatives responded by defending the old rule: let people speak. Let bad arguments be answered by better ones. Don’t give government, corporations, universities, or ideological mobs the power to decide what every American may say. Somehow, defending that older liberal principle became another mark of supposed right-wing radicalism.

Government has changed too. The national debt climbed into the tens of trillions. Trillion-dollar deficits became routine. Federal agencies accumulated extraordinary authority over subjects that previous generations would have considered local, private, or beyond Washington’s proper reach. Emergency powers expanded. Regulations multiplied. Unelected officials came to exercise tremendous influence over the daily lives of people who would never know their names.

Conservatives continued to make the same argument they had made for decades: government should spend less, borrow less, regulate less, and remain within the constitutional boundaries placed upon it. That position didn’t become more radical. Washington simply moved farther away from it.

Technology has made the problem even more obvious. Cameras can record license plates almost everywhere a person travels. Phones can reveal where we’ve been. Corporations accumulate vast amounts of information about our habits, purchases, interests, and movements.

Government possesses surveillance capabilities that earlier Americans could hardly have imagined. Yet when someone says a free people ought to be suspicious of all this, he is often dismissed as paranoid or anti-technology.

That suspicion isn’t new. It’s deeply American. The Founders were suspicious of concentrated power because they understood human nature. They didn’t believe good intentions were enough. Neither should we.

The pattern has become familiar. A longstanding social norm exists. Progressives challenge it and insist that the proposed change is limited. Conservatives resist and are told they’re overreacting. The change is adopted. Then the next demand arrives. The ground moves again.

Eventually conservatives stop retreating, organize serious resistance, and announce that there are some things they simply won’t surrender.

At that point, the resistance itself is called radical. That’s how political language gets turned upside down. It’s true that today’s conservative movement is angrier than it was twenty years ago. It’s more skeptical of universities, corporations, federal agencies, the national press, and even the Republican establishment. But that skepticism didn’t materialize out of thin air. People watched institutions they once trusted become increasingly hostile to their values. They watched political leaders promise one thing at election time and do another once safely back in office. They watched every compromise become the starting point for the next demand.

Eventually people noticed that compromise always seemed to move in the same direction. So they stopped moving.

That’s the part our critics refuse to understand. There is a difference between radicalism and reaction. If someone keeps moving the fence toward your house, defending your yard will eventually look aggressive to them. But you’re still standing in the same yard.

That is where a great many conservatives find themselves today. We aren’t asking America to commence upon some unprecedented social experiment. In most cases, we’re asking for things Americans took for granted within living memory: secure borders, equal treatment under the law, parental authority, recognition of biological reality, fiscal restraint, public safety, free speech, religious liberty, constitutional government, and a culture confident enough to defend its own inheritance.

For years, we were told to tolerate the changes. Then we were told to accept them. Then to celebrate them. Eventually we were told that refusing to participate in them was itself evidence of extremism.

Thankfully, some Americans have finally answered no. That doesn’t make them radicals. It may simply mean they have remembered where the line used to be, and decided they have retreated far enough.

Senator Chris McDaniel

This video, presented by Dr. Steve Turley, discusses a series of recent arrests, indictments, and convictions of various Democratic officials across the United States (0:00 – 1:11). The speaker characterizes these legal actions as a sign of growing accountability within the political system during the current presidential administration.

Key cases of political corruption discussed include:

Massachusetts: Lawrence Mayor Brian Deena was arrested and indicted on federal charges of wire fraud and money laundering, allegedly misusing over $1.5 million in COVID-19 relief funds (1:26 – 2:21). Massachusetts State Representative Francisco Paulino was also indicted in connection with the same scandal (2:21 – 2:45).

New Mexico: Former House Majority Leader Cheryl Williams Stapleton was found guilty on 37 felony charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, federal program bribery, and money laundering for steering vocational funding to a business she had ties to (3:16 – 4:58).

Missouri: Jackson County interim county executive Philip Levota was indicted on federal charges, including honest services fraud and bribery, related to allegedly trying to rig an election by offering government jobs to a rival to drop out of a race (4:58 – 5:43).

Mississippi: Columbus Vice Mayor Joseph Mickens was indicted for money laundering and rigging a city contract bid (5:43 – 6:28).

New Jersey: Lumberton Township committee woman Gina LaPlaca and her husband were accused of a ballot fraud scheme involving forged voter signatures on a petition (6:28 – 7:11).

Georgia: State Representative Sharon Henderson pleaded guilty to pandemic-related fraud for lying about her employment status to collect unemployment benefits (7:11 – 7:35).

Additional legal developments:

The video highlights that a federal appeals court rejected an attempt by New Jersey Congresswoman Monica McIver to dismiss assault charges related to a scuffle with ICE officers, ruling her actions were not protected by legislative privilege (9:27 – 10:26).

Concluding analysis:

Dr. Turley argues that these events represent the end of a long-standing “two-tier system of justice” where political insiders were previously protected from the consequences of their actions (10:26 – 12:43). He concludes by framing these legal developments as a necessary shift toward institutional accountability (12:43 – 13:09).

Dr. Steve Turley

Police in Minneapolis reportedly raided the apartment of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s son and seized firearms before arresting his roommate.

Law enforcement sources told Alpha News that a search warrant was carried out at the home of Omar’s son Adnan on Tuesday night.

According to the outlet, they recovered guns and ammunition from the home and arrested his roommate Abdulrahman Abdi, 22.

Earlier that day, the city’s police department said in a statement to the Daily Mail that they conducted a traffic stop and cited Abdi for no proof of insurance and no license.

The department said that Abdi was released at the scene and the vehicle was in the process of being impounded when a firearm was found inside.

Officers later tracked Abdi to an address on Marquette Ave where they said they arrested him ‘without incident.’

Abdi was later booked into Hennepin County Jail on a weapons charge before being released on Wednesday night, records show.

According to court records seen by the Daily Mail, Abdi has been convicted ten times in the past, most of the incidents have been misdemeanors.

Last year he was found to have been speeding and driving despite having his license revoked for a previous offense.

In 2024 he was convicted of a felony after officers reported him traveling at 108 miles per hour in St. Paul.

A statement of probable cause said he was behind the wheel of a Jeep Grand Cherokee and was speeding alongside a Dodge Durango.

He pleaded guilty to fleeing a police officer in a motor vehicle and was sentenced to one day inside Dakota County Jail.

UK Daily Mail ^ | 08/27/2026 | JOE HUTCHISON

Some violent crimes have seen the number of foreign suspects triple.

A forensic science police van drives towards the scene in an allotment complex in the western Spandau district of Berlin on July 26, 2026, where the chief suspect in the previous nights’ deadly attack near Berlin’s Pride parade was shot dead. JOHN MACDOUGALL / AFP.

According to official German government data, the number of foreign suspects in violent crimes have skyrocketed in Germany, since the start of the century. The number of foreigners accused of homicide increased by 77.1% between 2000 and 2025, while the increase in suspected sexual offenses was even more pronounced, rising by 148.2% over the same period.

The 2025 figures show that the proportion of foreigners involved in violent crime has increased overall by 71.6% since 2000. The number of non-Germans suspected of negligent simple bodily harm also rose by 169.3%.

Across the board, in almost all categories of crime the number of foreign suspects has significantly increased. In robberies, by 22.9%, while the number of pickpocketing suspects has almost doubled, rising by 97.9%. The proportion of foreigners involved in fraud increased by 45.3%, suspects of street crime, referring to offenses committed in public spaces, including violent, drug and vandalism offenses, showed a 52.6% jump.

Across total crime, defined as the sum of all offenses registered in the police crime statistics, the proportion of non-Germans increased by 39.8% over the same period. While every third crime is being committed by a foreigner, their number across the whole German population is only 14.9%, meaning they are much more likely to commit crimes than the local population.

Banned Before Release: Germany Rejects Migrant Crime Movie

Director Uwe Boll says the decision to block his new film is linked to its portrayal of migrants as perpetrators of violent crimes.

The European Conservative

Despite the gruel facts, large-scale, uncontrolled immigration into Germany continues.

The ratio of foreigners in Germany suspected of posing a threat increased by 231.5% since the start of the century. During the same period, the number of non-Germans listed by authorities as suspects in cases of intentional simple assault rose by 169.3%.

AfD politician Stephan Brandner, who had requested that the data be released, described the figures as “shocking news.”

The politician said the German Federal Republic “certainly has enough to deal with regarding German criminals,” so there is no need to import foreign criminals.

“Anyone who comes to Germany supposedly seeking protection and then becomes a criminal has forfeited their right to protection,” Brandner nailed down, in response to the inability of the German state to effectively deport foreign criminals.

The European Conservative ^ | 27 Aug, 2026 | Zolta Győri

The left told them that only anger against perceived injustices creates meaning and happiness, and they’ll destroy everything in their paths to achieve those goals.

Steve McCann | August 27, 2026

Recently, Peachy Keenan, the pseudonym of a well-known cultural commentator, writer, and critic of modern feminism, asked a question on her X account that succinctly summarizes the state of American feminism and the white liberal woman:

Why are so many women sooo angry? They won. They got everything they wanted. Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well. They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates, (UCLA undergrad is 60% female), they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer. They won: they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat. Marriage is optional, divorce is no-fault, they win 99% of the custody battles, they can control fertility at will, and they can’t get drafted. We are all living in the female future they promised.

Yes, they won, but that hasn’t changed the victim (women) and oppressor (white men) mindset that still permeates this irrational subculture. They will remain angry because they will never succeed in their quixotic quest for “meaning in their lives” based on their belief that happiness lies in “making a difference” by defeating societal demons such as “the patriarchy” or “White Supremacy.” In their addled thought process, there is no such thing as winning, only identifying new causes to keep this charade alive in perpetuity.

A case in point. About a year ago, out of curiosity, I watched a panel discussion with several feminist professors at a prestigious university. These academics were regaling a naïve and worshipful audience of mostly white women, plus a smattering of black women. The panel insisted that the new “civil rights movement” necessarily encompasses Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the LGBTQ movement, the plight of immigrants in the United States, the genocide in Gaza, undying support for the Palestinians, and Third Wave Feminism.

They had nothing to say about what had been accomplished over the decades. Instead, they incessantly portrayed the United States as an irredeemable racist and oppressive nation founded on white patriarchy. These leftists claimed, to raucous applause, that white privilege and resultant oppression required speeding the process to transform American culture and society, all while failing to acknowledge the transformations their movement had already precipitated.

The adoring and reverential expressions on the faces of the young women in the audience were priceless. It was as if they had suddenly discovered meaning and purpose in their apparently guilt-ridden, or cosseted, or rage-filled lives.

They no doubt thought that the prospect of being swept up in a grand crusade of promoting all manner of “civil rights” in a heartless, capitalistic society would bring relevance to their lives. What they did not fathom was that they were being manipulated by playing on their emotions and the nation’s history of civil rights movements solely to bring about a socialist one-party oligarchy

Over the past five decades, participation in protests and demonstrations advocating policies that destroy America’s culture and society has evolved into a full-time white liberal female occupation. Most of these protestors are 50+-year-old white women augmented by a vast number of vacuous, college-educated white women of all age groups who, together with their race-obsessed, college-educated black female counterparts, are mindlessly and, for many, unknowingly destroying American civilization.

Thanks to the Judeo-Christian values underpinning our nation’s founding, every generation of American society from the nation’s founding through the 1960s was swept up in one of three national movements—slavery’s abolition, women’s suffrage, and eliminating government-mandated racial segregation. The ultimate success of these movements also rested on Christian dogma and practice.

Because of the 195 years it took to achieve overall success, national civil rights crusades have become embedded in the nation’s DNA. By 1970, and for the first time in American history, there were no outstanding national civil rights issues to rectify. This potentially left the evolving agnostic narcissists in the Baby Boom Generation without an overriding national cause to rally around.

However, because they did not understand the Judeo-Christian basis of previous movements, many white liberal women obliviously fell prey to either wallowing in guilt over the nation’s past or espousing new and hitherto unheard-of “rights” as substitute religions. However, the radical left created virtually all of these “rights,” for they were determined not to let an opportunity to exploit female emotion and gullibility go to waste. The only question was: what could they successfully frame as national crusades?

Unsurprisingly, the first post-civil rights crusade was Second Wave Feminism, a movement that began in the mid-1960s and continued throughout the 1970s. It triggered religiously passionate mindsets and achieved fleeting “meaning in their lives” moments for a vast number of white women. It set the stage for overwhelming leftist women to dominate all the so-called “civil rights” movements since the 1980s and triggered the lunacy that engulfs the country today.

Thus, this movement can never win or declare victory. The never-ending search for meaning in their lives requires not only retaining the same villain—white men—but keeping the movement alive by continuously finding increasingly ludicrous policies to promote and espouse. These include their arguments regarding the following issues:

So-called transgenderism: What for centuries was considered to be a treatable mental illness (gender dysphoria) must now be cast as not only normal behavior, but a government-protected civil right safeguarded by law, which also includes, without parental consent, the unfettered access of impressionable and confused adolescents to permanent and irreversible mutilation.

Abortion: A baby in the womb does not become a human being until it fully exits the birth canal. Therefore, it can be aborted at any time prior to and including its exit from the birth canal.

Infanticide: As a corollary to and obvious extension of abortion, if a mother claims postpartum depression many months after giving birth, is on drugs, or finds a psychiatrist to confirm her mental state, it is permissible to premeditatively murder infants in cold blood.

Antisemitism dressed up as “anti-Zionism”: The Palestinians are the modern-day oppressed peoples that must be rescued and freed, as their oppressors are the Israelis and like-minded Americans. Because of the Jews and the oppressive governments of the United States and the West, Islamism and its disciples must be tolerated, accepted, and welcomed in Western society.

Illegal immigration: All illegal immigrants (also oppressed people) are welcome to come to America and, once here, including those who commit violent crimes, cannot be deported except under extraordinarily limited circumstances. Further, they are all eligible for never-ending economic assistance and eventual citizenship.

Hate speech: Government must be empowered to declare and censor what is “hateful and/or fallacious speech” by those with the “wrong” political leanings and to utilize the justice system to imprison or banish these seditionists.

Attacks on the criminal justice system: Crime is a byproduct of America’s past and a creation of an unjust society; therefore, crime must be tolerated and excused, and its perpetrators allowed endless second chances. Any undue effort to enforce criminal statutes is therefore a violation of human rights.

Because the United States is living in the feminist future that these witless, self-indulgent, agnostic, supposedly well-educated, and miserable women promoted, there is an ongoing calamitous erosion of a unique American civilization.

Remember the reluctant MAGA converts who assured us Donald Trump would moderate his tone and pivot to pragmatism after the election(s)? Well, he didn’t do any of that. They failed to account for the fact that Trump will never change.

Whether they like it or not, Democrats are in the same boat. Rosy-eyed party elites have convinced themselves that their voters and candidates will readily discard the “woke” nonsense that normal Americans cringe at.

Bless their hearts, the poor things.

“They’re never going to change,” writes Patrick Ruffini, a veteran pollster whose firm, Echelon Insights, recently assessed the willingness of Democratic voters to relinquish their wokeness.

Needless to say, the bitter clingers are winning. Just 35 percent of Democrats said the party should distance itself from the “woke” politics of recent years, while 42 percent preferred to stand their ground. The rest were unsure.

Younger Democrats were particularly keen to see the party stay woke. Among voters under 50, half said Democrats should stay the course, compared to 32 percent who said otherwise. “Very liberal” Democrats, who are typically most likely to vote in primary elections, were the most emphatic. They favored wokeness by a whopping 62-20 margin.

There is plenty of real-world evidence to back up these findings. Woke left-wing candidates who voiced support for defunding the police and abolishing prisons have enjoyed remarkable success in Democratic primaries this cycle.

Darializa Avila Chevalier is all but assured a seat in Congress next year after knocking off an establishment-backed opponent in New York. She has achieved an elite-level wokeness that regards interracial romance as a form of colonialism. She once bragged about using the American flag as a napkin, and is still undecided as to whether convicted murderers should go to prison.

Francesca Hong nearly won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Wisconsin despite an impressive array of deranged pronouncements to her name. She wanted to cancel Thanksgiving because it symbolizes violence against “Indegenous folx. [sic]” She lamented the “proximity to whiteness” that comes with having a biracial son, and recalled fleeing a restaurant with “too many old white people” to avert a panic attack.

Before the Obama Presidential Center could open its doors in June, attendees were called upon to acknowledge the “original inhabitants” of the stolen land on which it stands. So were the Democrats who gathered in February 2025 to elect a new DNC chairman and vice chairs—two of whom were subsequently stripped of their titles for violating the committee’s gender diversity mandates. More recently, Democrats have started invoking the “stolen land” argument to make the case against data center construction.

There is little evidence to suggest that Democrats will ever budge from their wildly unpopular support for transgender participation in women’s sports.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D., Mass.) is a perfect example. He tried to adopt the position shared by more than two-thirds of Americans. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that,” he told the New York Times days after the 2024 election.

Moulton is seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate this year, so naturally he reversed course. In a primary debate earlier this month, he apologized to the trans community for heartlessly prioritizing his daughters’ safety. “I deeply recognize your trauma, and I’m sorry if my comments hurt you,” Moulton said.

Abdul El-Sayed, the terrorist-adjacent woke candidate who upset an establishment rival in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, recently went on Fox News and defended his support for child sex-change operations by comparing them to circumcision. “It’s a problem that you think you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor and a patient,” El-Sayed told Fox host Jesse Watters. “I’m just saying that, yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling.”

More than 70 percent of Americans support a ban on so-called gender-transition surgery for minors, according to a Marquette Law School poll released in July 2025.

Good luck to all!

Washington Free Beacon

The people who live and breathe politics often talk as if the upcoming election is the most important election of all time. As they see it, we are in an unprecedented historical moment and the choices we make today will determine the fate of the nation. I understand their perspective and a younger version of me occasionally slipped into that mindset. However, far from being unprecedented, the core challenge facing America today was described more than 2,000 years ago by an ancient Greek philosopher.

Plato, a student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, imagined prisoners chained inside a dark cave, facing a blank wall. They could not see what was going on behind them, but were able to see shadows cast on the wall, illuminated by a fire.

Naturally, they tried to figure out what was going on by interpreting the shadows. The problem was that the shadows reflected reality but the prisoners came to believe they were reality. In this setting, it’s easy to imagine competing groups of prisoners arguing about how each movement of a shadow should be interpreted.

In our 10-10-80 nation, the comparison to America’s Political Class is chillingly obvious. The ten percenters, imprisoned within their ideological bubbles, have little to no understanding of the 80 percenters they want to rule. Since they don’t know what it’s like in the real world, they misinterpret reality based upon shadows like news coverage, social media firestorms, and low-turnout election results.

The shadows seen by political activists have some basis in reality, of course. Something caused the shadows. But shadows are often distorted in size and shape until they bear little resemblance to the reality behind them.

A good example is current Political Class uproar about former male NBA players wanting to play in the WNBA. To the fringe minority who talk politics daily, this is a really big deal. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of them are following news of the story very closely. However, to the vast majority who discuss politics no more than once a week, only 4% are paying that much attention to it.

A similar thing happened last year with Sydney Sweeney’s “great jeans” ads for American Eagle. Half of the politically obsessed fringe followed that story very closely. Among the more normal Americans, hardly anybody paid attention. Additionally, in both cases, the views of those in the political class were wildly different than the rest of America. A plurality (49%) of people who talk politics daily believe biological males who identify as women should be allowed to play in the WNBA. Among the larger group who tune out politics, only 10% agree.

With Sydney Sweeney, opinion was divided as to whether the ad was a racist nod to white supremacy or just a normal ad. Outside that bubble, however, America shrugged. By a six-to-one margin, these politically disengaged Americans dismissed the controversy, seeing nothing more than an attractive actress in a denim ad.

In other words, the ten percenters were latching onto shadows to fight their own ideological battles. They had little understanding of or interest in the reality that created the shadows.

It’s obviously problematic that those fighting to control the enormous power of government don’t understand the nation they want to rule.

What makes it even worse is the second part of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In his story, one of the prisoners escapes and finds out that the real world is nothing like what the prisoners had envisioned. Their interpretation of the shadows was way off base.

However, upon learning from someone who had actually seen the reality that was causing the shadows, the other prisoners didn’t change their perspective. Instead, they continued to believe their interpretation of the shadows represented reality.

Sadly, many of the ten percenters today are just as resistant to reality. They routinely chuckle about how voters hate Congress but love their own representative. In reality, half of all voters believe their own representative in Congress trades votes for cash. Few believe their rep is the best person for the job.

Similar misunderstandings can be found on issue after issue touching every aspect of politics and government. Recently, shadows cast by very low-turnout elections created a myth about the rise of Socialism in America. As I’ve recently explained, there has been no real world increase in support for socialism over the past decade. In fact, only about 6% of voters support Socialism as that term is understood by those inside the political bubble.

This particular misunderstanding highlights how dangerous the ten percenters are to America. If ten percenters on the left convince themselves that the American people really want Socialism, they will use the power of government to implement very un-American policies. At the same time, the ten percenters on the right won’t know what to do about it.

The good news is that the 80 percenters continue to embrace our nation’s noble founding ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance. The challenge before us is to help the ten percenters understand reality and make our government more responsive to people outside the political cave.

Scott Rasmussen, The Lyceum

President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Wednesday to share a list of grievances on how Republicans are “f*cking up” their midterm chances. Trump shared a July 14 post from influencer Matt Van Swol, which included a long list of things the president has touted as accomplishments, including “negative net migration” and fentanyl trafficking being down, in his second term and then Swol’s lengthy post.

“I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are ….. up right now,” Swol wrote in his post about people being “pissed off” at Republicans because they are not seeing major reforms they expected.

His message reads:

They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it.

No true accountability. No true mass deportations. No meaningful decrease in the deficit. Lots of very long vacations and no work. No bills being passed that REDUCE the government involvement in their lives.

I’m very worried the GOP is sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming.

People are pissed off that they voted Trump into office and then the GOP continues to slow-walk every reform people want.

Where are all the DOGE cuts that were promised? Where is the SAVE ACT? Why haven’t we defunded the Taliban yet?

Why are bills passing the House and then disappear in the Senate?

Why are the GOP still funding Left-wing NGOs that target and hate MAGA Republicans?

Why are members of the GOP pushing for mass amnesty instead of mass deportations?

People are waking up and they aren’t happy about it.

People believed they were voting for the Trump agenda. and instead, many feel like they’re getting the same old Washington.

If Republicans in Congress don’t start producing tangible results, they’re going to discover that frustration has consequences…

…And by the time they realize how deep-seeded that frustration is, it may already be too late.

Trump also took a dig at Republicans in an interview this month with Punchbowl News. While the president is facing his worst polling ever, he insisted that the public is not “angry” with him, but they are angry with Republicans.

“They’re angry at Republicans, but they’re not angry at me,” he said.

Trump said he hopes Republicans vote in the midterm elections, but he understands they’re “very angry.”

I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are fucking up right now.

I’m talking to people who normally have ZERO interest in politics who are legitimately pissed off.

They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it.

No true…

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) July 14, 2026

“The question is will they vote because a lot of them are very angry at Republicans,” he said.

Trump has expressed frustrations with GOP lawmakers on a number of issues.

Most recently, he’s lashed out at Senate Republicans for not passing the SAVE America Act, legislation that would put new restrictions on mail-in voting and require proof of citizenship to vote, something lawmakers have expressed concerns over with the midterms just weeks away.

Zachary Leeman, Mediaite

Obama says there is no “silver bullet” or quick fix solution for bringing down gas prices.

This may be true — but does this mean there’s no solution?

First of all, it isn’t the government’s job to bring down (or drive up) gas prices. The government’s job is to stay out of the market. Right now, the government interferes in the market in numerous ways. The most glaring way is that government stands in the way of oil production in the United States. Obama has refused

to permit additional oil drilling — or really any oil drilling at all — in the United States. As a result, there’s less oil on the market, supply is low relative to demand, and prices are higher than they otherwise would be.

Allowing for drilling is not a quick fix, either. But it’s the only rational step government can take, and it’s an example of why government should stay out of the way. Remember that the most dysfunctional parts of the marketplace are the ones where government interferes the most. Education is a mediocre mess — because government controls and subsidizes most of it. Health care is a growing mess — because government has regulated and subsidized it for decades, and is becoming more involved all the time. On the other hand, technological growth — computers, gadgets, smart phones — and the Internet have been much less regulated than these other sectors of the economy. As a result, customer needs come first and prices have been mostly coming down, not going up.

Obama may be a fool, but he’s not stupid. He knows all of this. He’s obviously not being honest. He says he wants gas prices to come down. If he did, he would immediately get out of the way so that oil producers could do their thing. He hasn’t, and he won’t. This is because he believes Americans should be forced to convert to a different form of energy — energy he considers more pure, and more appropriate. The problem is, there is no such energy that can compete with oil. Obama knows this, too. But all he can say to himself is, “Too bad.” That’s what he’s really saying when he claims, “There’s no silver bullet.” What he means is: “Oil and gas too expensive? Too bad.”

Why “too bad”? Because he wants to force Americans to change. If oil becomes more and more expensive, then Americans (Obama hopes) will be forced to consider alternative fuels. At present, manufacturers cannot sell “green energy” on the market, at least not on any wide scale, because there’s little or no profit to be made from it. But if gas prices go through the roof, that will change. By curbing and (best case, to Obama) destroying the market for gasoline and oil by making it too expensive for most people to afford, Obama thinks he can make people opt for things like wind, solar and other alternative forms of energy.

Imagine if the government had taken this stance back in the 1800s. Imagine if the government had decided that the horse and buggy should be replaced with something better, cleaner and more efficient. Could government have passed laws to make the manufacture and purchase of horses and buggies so expensive that people would gradually stop using them? If government had done this, would the automobile have come about much sooner? If so, then maybe government should restrict everything it doesn’t like. This will make human beings come up with better things. Clearly, this is insanity. But this is the premise implicit in all of Obama’s policies.

Obama’s error is the error of Communism, fascism and every form of force. Obama thinks that force will make people produce. He doesn’t think the profit motive is enough. For example, he doesn’t think that the desire to make a big profit is always a compelling reason to come up with a better, cheaper and cleaner form of energy to ultimately replace oil as the primary one. He thinks people will respond better to force than to profit. He probably thinks that force is more moral than profit. And we all know he certainly does not like profit. He has made that clear whenever he condemns those who make profit, saying they should be taxed at a higher rate, that their wealth should be “spread” around, and that America was made a great place by the poor and the middle class, and least of all by the wealth producers.

A government’s job is not to reinvent the wheel, and a government’s job is not to discover or invent a new fuel source. Governments don’t do this kind of thing, and cannot do this kind of thing. Only minds motivated by financial profit and/or a quest for knowledge ever discover or produce anything. People need to stop looking to government to do this for them, and stop waiting for government. People simply need to demand that government get out of the way and let profit-makers and innovators do the best they possibly can. Leave the best and the brightest unimpeded by self-anointed community organizers who don’t know much of anything.

Obama may think there’s no “magic bullet” for bringing down oil prices, but he surely believes government can come up with a magic bullet for replacing oil with an alternative form of fuel. Yet if such a market existed on any major scale, it would be on the marketplace by now, because there would be profit to be made in it. America elected a man as President who has no remote understanding of how business and markets work, and — more deeply — how the human mind works. Unfortunately, people will pay a higher price for gas and an even higher cost in lost innovation because of their support for this man.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. John Fetterman might want to trade in his black hoodie for an elephant badge if he wants to keep his seat in the Senate: New polling suggests that he could find friendlier terrain on the Republican side of the aisle than among the Democrats who elected him.

According to a shocking poll from The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Siena College, Fetterman has become a complete outcast in his own party. The survey reveals Fetterman is underwater at a brutal -41 approval rating with Democrats, while boasting a staggering +52 favorability rating with Republicans.

The jaw-dropping numbers come as Fetterman continues a high-profile, scorched-earth streak against his own party’s hard-Left wing, positioning himself as a moderate willing to lock arms with Republicans on key national security, energy, and foreign policy battles.

Fetterman’s rift with the Left was on full display when he slammed “AI doomsdaying” last week, aligning himself with President Donald Trump’s aggressive stance on artificial intelligence and data centers to counter China. Fetterman publicly rejected “political pandering and hyperbole over data centers,” taking aim at Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who wants a stop on AI development, which Fetterman blasted as a “China First” policy.

Fetterman has also ripped into Sanders over his support for controversial figures. In July, he referred to Sanders’ support for former Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, snapping, “I would really call Bernie Sanders to apologize for pushing this kind of predator — more than anyone he helped [to] elect — and now apologize to the victims, especially the woman that she claimed that he raped her, so I don’t know why you want to keep pushing these kinds of people. Maybe he should consider [sitting] a few out and stop pushing these kinds of communists, and now people like P. Hustle. Now he has been credibly accused of rape — and that’s fairly recent, too, that was only less than five years ago.”

Fetterman’s willingness to cross party lines isn’t new. He previously made waves by backing Republicans in carving out the filibuster to end a government shutdown. Fetterman also noted that Left-leaning networks like MS NOW stopped booking him once he began speaking out against his party’s consensus, while conservative outlets welcomed his no-nonsense style.

The biggest breaking point, however, remains foreign policy. Appearing on Fox News’ “Hannity,” Fetterman declared there was one thing that could push him straight out of the Democratic Party: if anti-Israel hostility officially becomes part of the party platform. Fetterman warned that “rank antisemitism” is being allowed to flourish on the far-Left and on college campuses. He remains the only Senate Democrat to vote against every Iran war-powers resolution this year.

In July, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was asked, “Senator Fetterman has indicated that if Democrats officially become anti-Israeli, he would leave the party. Have you had any conversations with him about maybe joining the GOP conference, and would you welcome him if he were to follow that path?”

Thune replied, “Yes, we would welcome him. I haven’t talked to him recently. I have had conversations with him in the past, as have many of my colleagues, about the challenges he faces in his caucus. There are many of us who I think would welcome the opportunity to have him join the Republican conference but you know ultimately that’s a decision that’s left up that’s up to him.”

“I mean, this is a party that’s moving further and further, more radically, and to the more extreme Left on a lot of issues,” Thune added. “And I think people like John Fetterman, who have views that probably reflect a more moderate or at least historically moderate Democrat position, are really kind of people without a home. So if he ever comes to the conclusion that he’s ready to move, we would certainly welcome it.”