Next month the most important political book of the year, or perhaps the decade, will be published. It is called The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. The author is Jacob Siegel, a journalist for the Tablet.

To summarize: shocked by the arrival of Donald Trump in 2016, American government officials, the media, and the technology giants created a system of censoring the public, spying on other opponents, and planting false stories. The media was complicit and will never fully recover.

Trump’s rise, Siegel writes, “meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy.” He goes on: “One of the most disorienting aspects of the conspiratorial mania that overtook America’s elites in response to the rise of Donald Trump was the sheer scale of expert consensus behind views that were, on their merits, utterly deranged. What an ordinary person saw in 2016 was the country’s most venerated institutions all promoting the same claims about a Russian takeover of the American political system. Any given charge about Trump’s ties to the Kremlin might fall apart under scrutiny, but there were so many, coming from seemingly authoritative sources, that their totality seemed to outweigh their individual merits. The alternative—that it might all be so much propaganda—was difficult to face.”

To face the truth means to face the fact that “legions of Harvard professors, senators, senior national security officials, and respected journalists touting Trump’s sinister connections to Vladimir Putin had allowed themselves to become credulous bullhorns for a cynical and destructive information operation. If that was true it suggested that institutions and individuals with hundreds of years of built-up trust behind them were not only capable of getting big questions wrong but could, at any moment, decide to join hands and break out in song while they led the entire country off a cliff.”

One of the things that is going to make The Information State so powerful is that it will challenge the media’s greatest power – the power to ignore. Siegel, a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is not MAGA, even if he is not liberal. He will be interviewed at the CUNY Graduate Center on March 16. His book will get reviewed – unlike others that the media chooses to ignore.

Siegel explores how reporters became more pliant and stupid, even as the digital revolution exploded with access and new voices. A key moment came in 2015 when White House aide Ben Rhodes tried to sell Obama’s deal with Iran. Rhodes observed, “Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington.” Siegel: “Without reporters on the ground, journalists simply retailed the narratives fed to them by their political contacts….Rhodes seemed to enjoy boasting about his power over people he considered beneath him. That did not make his assessment of the media landscape wrong. ‘The average reporter we talk to is twenty-seven years old,’ he noted. ‘Their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.’ The depth of reporting and institutional experience built into the twentieth-century print model was dead. Something else that was easier to manipulate had taken its place.”

When asked about the “onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal,” Rhodes explained how the White House had manufactured a consensus: “We created an echo chamber.” The legions of experts were apparatchiks. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say,” Rhodes acknowledged. The echo chamber effect relied on the twin revolutions in social media and the smartphone. It worked because great masses of people had already been herded into the vast, unbroken wholeness of the digital networks, where a message could reverberate from one end to the other without hitting any structural walls. Twitter, the social media platform favored by journalists and DC insiders, played a crucial role by synchronizing the various narrative purveyors in the echo chamber.”

On December 23, 2016, Obama signed the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act. The Act directed the State Department to expand the mission of the recently formed Global Engagement Center, run out of the Department of Homeland Security, and whose job was to counter the effects of foreign propaganda and disinformation. Siegel notes that “by creating a mechanism to enforce a party line on matters related to fighting disinformation and defending ‘US interests,’ the agency effectively created an official government office for coordinating the resistance to Trump.”

Then came Russiagate. Terrible people like John Brennan of the CIA, James Comey of the FBI, and President Barack Obama created a false story and sold it to the American people. Government officials were practicing the new art of “hybrid warfare,” which involved manipulating information itself. “Hybrid warfare,” Siegel writes, “provided the framework for reclassifying populist parties as security threats and shoving them outside the protection of the law.”

Obama also forced people like Mark Zuckerberg and platforms like Twitter to go along. Zuckerberg at first resisted, but quickly caved when Obama demanded that they combat “disinformation.” The new Leviathan, observes Siegel, was huge. The “whole-of-society apparatus” intent on “fighting disinformation” was in reality a group that “fused the political goals of the Obama-led ruling party with the institutional agenda of the intelligence agencies, funding from the financial elite, the narrative power and activist fervor of the media and NGOs, and the tech companies’ technological control of the public arena. The fact that the populist challenge was both legal and highly democratic did not affect their view that it was illegitimate. If democracy allowed such a threat to arise, then the rules of democracy would have to be changed.”……..SNIP………

Mark Judge, Hotair

gender identity or sexual orientation.

The $750,000 will cover payments to “teachers’ association members who identify as LGBTQ between October 2017 through 2022 for injury to their dignity, feelings and self-respect.”

Yes, in Canada, according to the law, if you hurt the “feelings” of a “2SLBGTQ” person, then the government will destroy your life. That’s what this decision means. And no mainstream Canadian politician seems to care, as far as I can tell. There certainly hasn’t been any massive outrage in Canada over this decision.

Even before we look at the content of the allegedly “offending posts,” this decision is — when accurately viewed not as an aberration but as a symptom of the overarching communist tyranny in Canada — a free-standing justification to invade and depose the Canadian regime. The right to freedom of speech is the single most important right in the Western World. It’s why it’s the First Amendment to our Constitution. And no matter how offensive your “speech” may be, and no matter whose “feelings” you might hurt, it doesn’t matter. Once you lose the freedom of speech, you become a rogue, tyrannical state. This is worse than North Korea, in many ways. At least North Korea is nowhere near our border.

Now you might say, well, maybe this guy was threatening someone, or saying things that were truly dangerous. Let’s open the tribunal’s decision and see.

On October 23, 2017, Mr. Neufeld posted a long, public statement on Facebook, describing [teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity] as a “weapon of propaganda,” which instructs children about the “absurd theory” that “gender is not biologically determined, but a social construct.” He said “allowing” children to “change gender” was child abuse. Mr. Neufeld ended the post saying he belonged in a country like Russia or Paraguay, “which recently had the guts to stand up to these radical cultural nihilists.”

In a separate post, “He calls “[t]ransgenderism … a way of coping and surviving horrendous physical and sexual abuse as children” and says that the most “at-risk children” are “disturbed and mentally ill children — especially autistic, obsessive/compulsive, sexual abuse survivors and post-traumatic Stress syndrome kids.”

Everything in these posts is unquestionably true. As always, what’s happening here is that the censors realize they can’t win an actual argument. They know that their ideology doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. So instead of allowing debate, they’re going to force everyone to comply. And the more you read this decision, the more obvious that becomes. Here’s easily the most Orwellian passage to ever appear in a legal decision in memory. It’s truly deranged.

Transpeople are, by definition, people “whose gender identity does not align with the sex assigned to them at birth.” If a person elects not to “believe” that gender identity is separate from sex assigned at birth, then they do not “believe” in transpeople. This is a form of existential denial. …It is not, as Mr. Neufeld argues, akin to religious beliefs. A person does not need to believe in Christianity to accept that another person is Christian. However, to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth.

As this Tribunal has recognized, “the question of whether transgender people exist and are entitled to dignity in this province is as valuable to ongoing public debate as whether one race is superior to another” …

Calling transness “gender ideology” allows anti-trans activists to hide behind a veneer of reasonableness. It allows them to say, as Mr. Neufeld did in his statements, that they are not attacking human beings. They are simply opposing a set of ideas. But behind this insidious veneer is the proposition that transness is not real. Such phrasing can make it easier to ignore that trans people are human beings.”

It’s just an extraordinary passage, for so many reasons. First of all, even if he was denying the actual existence of trans people as human beings, he should be free to do that. If someone says I don’t exist, they aren’t harming me in any way. They could only harm me with that claim if I’m so mentally unstable that they might manage to persuade me of my own non-existence. But in any case, he is not denying the existence of people who call themselves trans. He is denying the validity of the claim they’re making about themselves. And if you don’t have the right to do that, then you don’t have any rights at all.

The Canadian tribunal says it’s not “valuable” to have this conversation. Which, again, even if that were true, only a communist dystopian hellhole would have a tribunal that legally declares what conversations are valuable or not. And that’s what Canada has become. The tribunal draws a comparison between this and race, saying it’s not valuable to debate whether members of one race can be different from another, on average, in ways that are positive or negative. Clearly, they don’t think it’s “valuable” to talk about race, because they don’t think it serves any purpose, other than emboldening racists or whatever.

But in the same breath, these *same people* will mandate anti-white racial discrimination and relentless affirmative action, on the theory that *all racial disparities between whites and non-whites* are the result of systemic discrimination and white supremacy. And that theory would fall apart completely if someone could point to an alternative explanation for racial disparities. So really, it’s not that the tribunal thinks the debate on race isn’t “valuable” or relevant. It’s that, if you allow debate on the issue, then people might start to question some core tenets of leftism. And the “Human Rights Tribunal” can’t allow that. Along the same lines, this tribunal says, it’s simply not “valuable” to debate the issue of whether a 10-year-old boy can instantly transform into a girl. It’s transparently an effort to shut down a debate that they know they’re losing.

The decision is the codification of trans insanity into law, which will have enormous consequences for children in Canada. It will ruin thousands of lives. The decision also amounts to the formal suspension of the freedom of speech in Canada, which will be the death knell of the entire country. It’s the position of the Canadian government that, if you hold the wrong opinions, then your property is forfeit. You don’t actually own anything. You’ll have to hand over your life savings.

This has been coming for a long time. As we’ve talked about, Canadian courts have already started informing homeowners that the “Indigenous tribes” actually own their land. So even though Canadians paid for their homes, they don’t really own them. It’s similar to what we saw during the trucker convoy, when peaceful protesters discovered that their bank accounts had been seized. Canada is a perfect expression of the World Economic Forum’s goal, which is that in the future, people will own nothing. Before this ideology spreads any further, we need to stop it.

And that’s not even getting into the Canadian government’s deliberate and ongoing effort to murder its own citizens. The outlet “Right to Life News” took a look at an official report from the government of Canada on this topic. Here’s what it found, per RightToLife.

An official report by the Chief Coroner of Ontario’s Medical Assistance in Dying Death Review Committee (MDRC) highlighted that, in 2023, 65 people in Ontario had their lives ended by Canada’s assisted suicide and euthanasia programme on the same day that they made their requests to do so. A further 154 people had their lives ended the day after their request was made.

One of those cases involved a woman named Mrs. B, who was in her 80s. She had heart surgery and was suffering complications, so she chose to receive palliative care. When her spouse requested a euthanasia assessment, Mrs B. indicated that she wanted to withdraw that request “citing personal and religious values and beliefs,” preferring instead to pursue “in-patient palliative care/hospice care.” But hospice care was denied, so her spouse again requested a euthanasia assessment. That time, Mrs. B apparently relented — even though one of her assessors “held concerns regarding the necessity for ‘urgency’ and … the seemingly drastic change in perspective of end-of-life goals, and the possibility of coercion or undue influence (i.e. due to caregiver burnout).”

These stories are very common, which is why so-called “medical assistance in dying” is now the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada. Again, the MAID program on its own — the widespread systematic killing of the sick and the vulnerable — would easily be a valid moral justification for invading the country and deposing the regime. This is happening right over our border. Right in our backyard. Any regime that engages in outright eugenics, executing people who are deemed undesirable, no longer has any moral claim to legitimacy. In Canada, they have “free healthcare” — but the healthcare is a lethal injection. We also talked about the story of the 26-year-old man who was murdered because he had “seasonal depression,” in addition to diabetes and blindness. In short, Canada has begun killing its own citizens because its healthcare system is overrun with foreigners — and also because they’re running out of organs. So they’re trying to kill two birds with one stone here. They want to reduce the population to ease the burden on the healthcare system, and they also want more organs that the healthcare system can use.

And by the way, the people who are getting put to death are *not* the foreigners. It’s overwhelmingly white Canadians who are being put down. Something like 95% of so-called “MAID Recipients” are white. So the replacement is occurring on both ends. They’re importing foreigners, and they’re killing the white people.

There are many more human rights abuses in Canada that we could talk about, from the mutilation and castration of children in the name of gender ideology, to the church burnings based on a false narrative intended to demonize Christians, to the state-funded murder of children — including partial birth abortions. There are no federal laws restricting abortion at all in Canada. That means it is legal to execute a fully developed infant while the child is being born. That’s what a partial birth abortion is — it’s just straight up infanticide, killing an infant who is in the middle of being delivered anyway. That is legal in Canada. And it is, again, all by itself, just as evil as anything that the North Korean or Iranian regime has ever done. Period.

We have deposed many governments for less. And in this case, there’s yet another reason to invade Canada, which is that a lot of people in Canada want us to do it. And the Canadians who would oppose us, as I mentioned, have already been disarmed. They’re completely powerless. The Trump administration seems to be aware of all of this, which is why the Treasury secretary just suggested that high-level talks with Alberta officials are currently underway. Watch:

If you live in Alberta — the economic engine of Canada, and the province where most of my Canadian listeners live — then this is very good news. You have an “off ramp,” as Canada continues its slide into total decay and dysfunction. Alberta has seen what’s happened to Toronto and Vancouver. Alberta understands how unrecognizable these places have become. And all along, with their tax dollars, Alberta has been funding the collapse of these provinces. That doesn’t need to continue any longer. In about 48 hours, the U.S. military can put an end to it.

Yes, at the moment, an attack on Iran appears to be imminent. America may be on the verge of another large-scale military commitment in a region of the world thousands of miles away. But Canada is right here. It is very easy to argue that not only do we have a greater moral responsibility to respond to atrocities in Canada because it’s right here, on our continent, right next door, but also (and more importantly) that Canada’s slide into a communist dystopia overrun with third-world foreigners presents a clear and present danger to our country and our wellbeing. It is not readily apparent how an evil regime in Iran presents any real threat to the United States. It is, however, very readily apparent how an evil regime seated 60 miles from our own border does present a real threat to us. We already beat them in hockey. The funny thing is that conquering the entire country would actually be considerably easier and less bloody than that hockey game. Does that mean we should do it? Well, I think there’s a very respectable argument, which I have just laid out. And today, as we celebrate our gold medal, it’s something worth considering.

The Boston Globe ran a poll last December which found that a full third of respondents were thinking about leaving the state because of the high cost of living.

The Globe/Suffolk survey found that about one-third of Massachusetts voters have seriously considered leaving the state in the past year because of affordability pressures, even as a majority still believe the state is generally moving in the right direction. Inflation, health care costs, housing, taxes, and soaring utility bills topped the list of financial stressors.

Boston.com asked their readers how they felt and and even higher percentage said they were looking to move. Here’s one response they received:

“This state just keeps getting more and more expensive and there’s no end in sight. I realize that inflation and tariff impacts are a nationwide problem, but here in MA, it definitely feels worse. I feel that our elected officials, from my own town’s government up to the Governor herself, aren’t doing anything about it. They all just complain and blame the president, which I see as deflecting. My heating bills are insane, my grocery costs are eye-watering, and my taxes just keep going up year over year … It feels like MA is run by the ultra-wealthy elite, and I’m not in the club so I’m out of here.”

Another person said they planned to move to North Carolina and called staying in Massachusetts “financial suicide.” The numbers back up the anecdotes. The state is shrinking.

People are fleeing high-tax Massachusetts at a much higher rate than those moving to the Bay State, resulting in a net domestic out-migration of 182,145 over the past five years, according to a new watchdog report…

“The net loss of 182,000 residents to domestic outmigration is like losing one-and-a-half Cambridges,” Pioneer Institute Executive Director Jim Stergios said in a statement. “When you pair that with the loss of private-sector jobs — particularly in professional, scientific, and technical fields — it’s clear we have serious work to do to reverse a flagging economy.”

High taxes are almost certainly a part of the reason for the large number of residents headed to other states.

Just a decade ago, the economy in Massachusetts was growing. In 2016 its economy saw growth as high as 3.7 percent, above the national average. But high taxes coupled with rapidly growing state spending have eroded the state’s competitiveness.

Since 2018, the state budget has increased by more than 50 percent — far outpacing inflation or family income growth. CNBC now ranks us 49th in the cost of doing business. The Tax Foundation’s 2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index ranked Massachusetts 43rd overall.

Of course Massachusetts isn’t the only state facing these problems. California, New York and Illinois also top the list of states with a lot of people leaving. One reason taxes are so high in blue cities and states is the high cost of unionized labor.

Blue-state and blue-city voters pay higher taxes. More than half of city and local government expenditures (and 20 percent of state expenditures) are paid out to employees. These blue states and cities often also pay state and local government workers more than similar jobs pay in red jurisdictions, even after adjusting for the cost of living.

Much of this gap is tied up in pension benefits. Workers generally value higher wages today more than retirement guarantees in the future. But pensions are attractive to politicians who pass future costs to future taxpayers. And it is the job of unions to fight for the largest benefits they can…

Consider Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois. A fearless opponent of Donald Trump, his bravery failed him when Chicago police and firefighter unions sought to raise pensions, often by thousands of dollars. Against the advice of civic and business leaders concerned about, as they put it, “grossly underfunded pensions,” Mr. Pritzker signed legislation that partly undid a 2010 attempt to rein in benefits for new employees.

The new law will cost the city $60 million next year — more than enough money to cover the city’s summer job program — before ballooning to $11 billion over three decades. Because of Illinois’s Constitution, the commitments cannot be reversed.

About half of union members in the U.S. are public sector workers, meaning they represent workers by securing labor agreements with elected officials. And those elected officials in turn rely on the support and funding of labor unions to get elected. This is great for unions and democratic politicians but it’s terrible for taxpayers who get stuck with bills that gradually make up a significant portion of city and state budgets. For instance, about 40% of Chicago’s annual budget goes to pensions and debt service. Statewide that figure is around 30%. This makes it very difficult for elected officials to do anything about high taxes.

Finally, Fareed Zakaria had a good segment on his show in which he made the case that blue cities are out of control. He’s primarily talking about New York City and Los Angeles, but the problems are the same as the ones in Boston and Chicago. High taxes and high cost of living created by ever-expanding city and state budgets that outstrip the rate of inflation and ignore shrinking populations. This is more than 6 minutes long but it’s all worth watching.

Blue cities are out of control, promising more, spending more, delivering less and pushing off fiscal problems to some future day.

Democrats in city halls should stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work.

My take: pic.twitter.com/kwYkA4XEjx— Fareed Zakaria (@FareedZakaria) February 22, 2026

John Sexton, Hotair

Young girls in Minnesota are suffering irreversible harm in silence, even though state law has called the act a felony for more than thirty years. Female genital mutilation—cutting or removing parts of a girl’s external genitalia for cultural reasons—continues inside tight-knit Somali immigrant families, shielded by shame, family pressure, and official reluctance to look too closely. Despite a documented survivor population in the state and a national estimate exceeding half a million affected women and girls, Minnesota prosecutors have secured zero convictions.

Zahra Abdalla still carries the memory of the day it happened to her. Between the ages of six and seven, in a Kenyan refugee camp, adult women from her community pinned her down without anesthesia and used a razor blade.

“They tied my hands and my legs,” she recalled. “I remember being held down. I remember the pain—and knowing I could not escape.” She fought back hard enough to interrupt the procedure before it was finished, but the damage was done. The wound was washed with salt water. Years later, as a grown woman in Minnesota, Abdalla needed surgery, endured multiple miscarriages, and faced excruciating difficulties with intimacy. Today she leads the Somaliweyn Relief Agency, determined to break the code of silence that protects the practice.

Abdalla makes clear that the custom is not abstract. In the communities where it thrives, families view it as essential for a girl’s marriage prospects and social value. “It’s tied to dowry. It’s tied to marriage,” she said. “It’s tied to what men expect.” Girls who resist risk being seen as damaged goods. The pressure is so intense that some families reportedly fly daughters back to Somalia or neighboring countries during school breaks to have the procedure performed out of sight of American authorities.

The numbers explain why Minnesota sits at the center of this American failure. Somalia reports a 98 percent prevalence rate among women and girls ages 15 to 49, according to United Nations figures. Minnesota is home to the largest Somali population in the United States, and federal estimates from more than a decade ago already placed tens of thousands of women and girls here at risk or already cut.

A CDC-supported study between 2019 and 2021 identified Minneapolis as one of four U.S. metro areas with a significant survivor population. Yet the Minnesota Department of Health does not track specific FGM cases, and no state agency publishes enforcement data.

Survivors and advocates describe the same wall of secrecy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and founder of the AHA Foundation who underwent the procedure herself as a child, does not soften the truth.

“Female genital mutilation is violence against the most vulnerable—children,” she stated. “It causes infection, incontinence, unbearable pain during childbirth and deep physical and emotional scars that never heal. Religious or cultural practices that deliberately and cruelly harm children must be confronted. No tradition can ever justify torture.” She survived. She refuses to let the next generation endure the same.

Minnesota first banned the practice in 1994, making it a felony with no parental-consent defense. Congress later strengthened federal law, with President Donald Trump signing expansions in 2018 and the Stop FGM Act in 2021 to cover interstate and international travel. A 2017 federal case in Michigan involved two Minnesota girls allegedly taken across state lines for the procedure, but that prosecution collapsed on jurisdictional grounds before the statute was fixed. In Minnesota itself, court records, licensing boards, and county attorneys show a perfect record of inaction: not one documented prosecution in thirty-two years.

State Representative Mary Franson, a Republican who has pushed FGM legislation since 2017, points to the obvious problem.

“It’s hidden—it’s a cultural practice, and who is doing the cutting could be a family member or a doctor who is also in that same culture,” she said.

The current legislative session features a bipartisan bill to create a task force on prevention, authored chiefly by Democratic Representative Huldah Momanyi-Hiltsley of Kenyan heritage and co-sponsored by Franson and several Somali-American and other Democratic lawmakers. Franson has faced accusations of racism for her involvement, the same dynamic that stalled her earlier efforts to treat FGM explicitly as child abuse. The pattern is familiar: Minnesota authorities have hesitated before when cultural sensitivity collided with evidence of large-scale wrongdoing, whether in welfare fraud or daycare scandals.

The consequence is simple and brutal. Girls who should be protected by American law instead learn early that some traditions are allowed to operate outside it. Medical professionals encounter survivors in clinics but report nothing that leads to charges. Families weigh silence against ostracism. And the state that prides itself on progressive values refuses to enforce the one law that would shield its most defenseless residents from ritualized violence.

Survivors like Zahra Abdalla and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have already done the hardest part: they spoke. The rest is on lawmakers, prosecutors, and the public. A task force may study the problem. Real accountability demands arrests, convictions, and the clear message that no community’s customs override the right of a child to grow up whole. Until that line is drawn and defended without apology, Minnesota’s felony statute will remain little more than words on paper while girls continue to pay the price in blood and silence.

Samara Sterling

Several prominent Democrats have been open and vocal about their plans to punish members of the Trump administration, including civilian ICE agents, if they regain power. Eric Swalwell has vowed to make ICE agents’ lives a living hell if he’s elected governor of California, Rep. Shri Thanedar said Dems will prosecute ICE and Border Patrol agents, as has Philly DA Larry Krasner, and Mehdi Hasan wants the next Democratic president to run on a platform of prosecuting conservatives.

Now Suan Rice, the former Obama National Security Advisor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, as promised that Democrats will punish those who “bent the knee” to President Trump.

“When it comes to the elites, the corporate interests, the law firms, the universities, the media…it is not going to end well for them, for those that decided…that they would act in their perceived very narrow self interest,” Rice said, “which I would underscore is a very short-term self-interest and take a knee to Trump.”

“I think they’re not starting to realize…this is not popular. Trump is not popular. What he is doing, whether on the economy and affordability, or immigration now, is not popular, and that there is likely to be a swing in the other direction, and they are going to be caught with more than their pants down. They’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box,” Rice said.

Simply incredible. The Democrats have spent a decade telling us that President Trump is an authoritarian, a fascist, Hitler, who is weaponizing government and then they run on a platform of punishing the people who didn’t resist Trump to their liking.

Mitch McConnell’s handlers are blocking the SAVE Act from being brought to a vote on the Senate Floor.

This guy was the leader of the Senate Republican Conference for 17 years, from 2007 to 2025.

The last few years have been difficult for the senior Kentucky Senator.

McConnell is 84 and is failing fast. He has no idea what is going on. But he does know he hates Trump, and that keeps him getting out of bed in the morning to screw the people of Kentucky and the US.

And now his handlers are blocking the SAVE ACT from reaching the US Senate floor for a vote.

Over 80% of Americans support the SAVE Act that forces voters to show an ID before voting.

But Mitch hates Trump and America so he’s blocking the Senate vote.

And he was the Republican Senate leader for over a decade!

Rep. Tim Burchett explains how McConnell’s handlers and big donors don’t want fair elections. McConnell is following their orders.

How sick!

What is happening with Mitch McConnell and why is he stopping the SAVE AMERICA ACT?

— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) February 20, 2026

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The Left would like to portray white culture as a force of oppression—and deny its existence in any other context.

To my recurring frustration, much of modern politics can be reduced to a series of language games. Political fights rarely touch the substance of the disagreement, but instead hover on the thin layer of language that merely refers to the substance—or all too often, conceals it from view.

In the modern era, the Left’s coalition of liberals, progressives, and Marxists have turned these language games into an art. They deploy particular concepts when it serves their needs to do so; they deny the existence of those same concepts when it does not.

Last week’s confirmation hearing for Claremont Institute fellow Jeremy Carl, nominated by President Trump as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, neatly illustrates this phenomenon. In this case, it involved the use of one of the Left’s most beloved bits of language: “whiteness.”

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy relentlessly grilled Carl about his past statements on race and his book, The Unprotected Class, which documents the history of DEI and “anti-white discrimination.” Murphy alternated between outrage and perplexity, accusing Carl of being a “white nationalist” for allegedly believing that “white culture” is a distinct sociological phenomenon. (The phrase does not appear in Carl’s book.) The subtext of Murphy’s performance was that he, Murphy, was befuddled by the notion of “white culture,” as if its existence were a wild fiction or conspiracy theory.

But his ignorance was purely performative. He knows exactly what “white culture” points toward. Murphy spent his formative years as the son of a corporate lawyer in Wethersfield, Connecticut, which was, at the time, almost exclusively white. He studied at Williams College, founded by Anglo-Protestants in 1793, and at the University of Oxford. As his campaign literature boasts, he is a true son of Connecticut, whose roots in the state trace back multiple generations on “[b]oth sides of Chris’s family.” This is precisely the milieu that constitutes “white culture,” which simply means the customs, manners, and habits of Americans of European descent.

Granted, it is theoretically possible that, like the water in which the proverbial fish swims, this culture was invisible to Murphy. But it is more likely that Murphy is simply playing a language game, denying the existence of the culture he grew up in to score points against a political enemy seated beneath him.

We’ve seen a lot of this game in recent years. During America’s “racial reckoning,” virtually all our prestige institutions advanced a notion of “whiteness” that sought to pathologize “white people” as inherently oppressive and “white culture” as pernicious. Now, the same people who marshaled these narratives, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, are pretending that these concepts don’t exist and that anyone who uses them is engaged in a racist conspiracy theory.

The only way to pass through the thicket of language games is first to clarify the concepts and define the terms. Only then can we begin to separate good from bad, useful from harmful.

In this case, we might begin with a short etymology of the term “white.” In the vernacular sense, everyone knows what “white” means: it is a color-coded shorthand for “Americans of European descent,” in the same way that “black” is a shorthand for Americans of African descent and “brown” is now often used as a shorthand for Americans of Latin American and Indian subcontinental descent. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that these terms are reductive, outdated, overbroad, or insensitive—I am not partial to them, for several reasons—but they are all attempts to describe the reality of continental ancestry groups.

The term “white” came into use after the discovery of the New World, when Europeans left the old continent and looked for ways to describe the different populations they encountered. While the dominant culture of England’s colonies was certainly English, there were enough Europeans of other nationalities that the colonial-era American writer Hector St. John de Crevecoeur described America’s mix of English, French, German, and Dutch frontiersmen as “a new race of men”—in short, “white people”—in contradistinction to the native tribes and African slaves who also populated the continent. (Again, we might wince at the crude use of color as a shorthand for groups, but as a historical matter, these were categories that all groups observed, including minority ones.)

Following the colonial period, America’s demographics became more complicated. New European groups arrived in the nineteenth century, and then other groups from around the world arrived in great numbers in the twentieth century, changing the demographic composition of the United States and increasing the diversity both within and between the main continental groups. Today, “white” contains Scandinavians and Sicilians, “black” contains descendants of slaves and recent African immigrants, and “brown” contains people from as far afield as Peru and Pakistan.

These terms are obviously imprecise, but most Americans can see their limitations and understand the categories as they are used in everyday life. For most people, as they survey their own experience, America is an assemblage of white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native American people, all with their own distinct cultures. At the superficial level, these can be distinguished by general patterns of ancestry, language, religion, cuisine, music, and shared history.

These cultures overlap in our freewheeling American context, and their mingling has provided a rich source of popular entertainment. The film Rush Hour, featuring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, is an extended riff on the cultural discontinuity between black and Asian culture. Likewise, the film White Chicks, featuring Marlon and Shawn Wayans, is a romp-style comedy in which two black FBI agents disguise themselves as white women. These films work precisely because most Americans immediately understand signifier and signified: “white,” “black,” “Asian,” and the groups they describe.

Why, then, would an educated man like Senator Murphy pretend not to understand these basic categories? Because the Left would like to portray “whiteness” exclusively as a force of oppression, and deny its existence in any other context. This particular language game is the identity-based version of what Michael Anton calls the “celebration parallax.” In this case, it means that “white,” as a shorthand for Americans of European descent, can be freely used for purposes of demonization—but it cannot be used to protest discrimination against white Americans.

This “whiteness parallax” is a malicious double standard. Personally, I don’t like the term “whiteness,” which is a Marxist coinage, and would be happy to replace the current shorthand with something better. But in any case, there should be a vocabulary to identify Americans of European descent in the same way that we identify all other groups. If all cultures truly can be celebrated, then that would mean the majority culture, too.

The Carl affair is a reminder that none of us should be shamed into silence about our history. The genius of the early Americans is that they gave us a nation that, over time, yielded a shared culture capable of recognizing the contributions of various groups while building a government based on equality under the law. At our best, we can honestly discuss the realities and differences among cultural groups while insisting that, as a matter of policy, we treat all individuals as individuals.

It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that our founding culture should be admired for its virtues, remonstrated for its vices, and celebrated alongside the contributions from all of those who came afterward.

Christopher F. Rufo, City Journal

“A Communist system can be recognized by the fact that it spares the criminals and criminalizes the political opponent.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn