federal judge on Thursday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to implement his executive order tightening mail-in voting, slapping down Democrats’ arguments for now that federal efforts to police voter rolls with citizenship checks was illegal.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointed jurist, ruled that Democrats failed to show they have standing at present to challenge the order or have suffered any harm that would warrant a preliminary injunction.
“Given that the Executive Order does not command Plaintiffs to do anything, and that no agency has yet acted pursuant to the Order in a way that could harm Plaintiffs, they have not suffered any harm at present,” the judge wrote.
You can read the ruling here.
Nichols rejected several of the Democrats’ arguments that Trump’s executive order could disenfranchise millions of voters, including that creating state-by-state citizenship lists to check voter rolls would somehow be harmful, even if they were inaccurate.
“It remains speculative whether the State Citizenship Lists, if and when they are initially compiled, will contain inaccuracies,” he wrote. “Even if they contain initial inaccuracies, the Executive Order requires the adoption of procedures that will allow individuals to access and, if necessary, update or correct their information in the Lists.”
The judge also rejected the notion that the federal government sending information to the states about voters would somehow violate voters’ privacy.
“Plaintiffs fail to demonstrate that such action—that is, the sharing of name, age, and residence information between and among government agencies, if already known to the federal government—would cause a harm sufficient to establish Article III standing,” he ruled.
Ocean “acidification” is a somewhat unique branch of the overarching climate scare. It differs from other branches of the big scare in that it does not depend on atmospheric heating as the driver of the supposed scary consequences. Instead, with ocean “acidification,” the idea is that increased CO2 in the atmosphere (from the burning of fossil fuels) leads to increased CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which leads to lower pH of ocean water, which then becomes the driver of the alleged scary consequences. Thus, ocean “acidification” can theoretically work as a scare even if the atmosphere fails to heat with increasing CO2 content to the extent predicted by advocates’ climate models.
But the ocean “acidification” claim has its own frailties. For advocates of apocalyse, it is a problem that the ocean is (somewhat) alkaline, rather than acidic, and that the change in ocean pH from even large increases in CO2 in the atmosphere is small. Some might even call the change in ocean pH “slight.” And the pH change, even in worst-case scenarios, is not nearly enough to bring it down to the level of neutrality, let alone acidity. The last point is the reason that I have been putting the term “acidification” in quotes.
So, how can advocates make ocean “acidification” into something sufficiently scary to motivate lots of people to hate or fear fossil fuels? Well, perhaps they could manufacture a claim that somewhat lower pH would kill all the tropical fish. OK, but the claim could not be that slightly lower pH will directly kill the fish — nobody would ever buy that. There would have to be a different mechanism.
Several years ago (May 2021) I had a post covering the work of a pair of researchers in Australia who had come up with a claim fitting just this description. The researchers in question were Philip Munday and Danielle Dixson of James Cook University in Queensland. Over the course of multiple years and some 22 peer-reviewed papers, those two (and co-authors) had put forth a claim that lower ocean pH would drive tropical fish crazy, or at least cause the fish to experience “profound behavioral and sensory impairments” that would imperil their survival. As should be obvious, this claim gave extraordinary support to the anti-fossil fuel narrative, independent of any claim of global warming, and as a result gave the papers a very high profile, and brought the authors great acclaim.
But it was too good to be true. The occasion for my May 2021 post was a paper that had appeared in Nature in 2020, by authors Timothy Clark, et al., reporting on the results of efforts to reproduce the Munday/Dixson results. Excerpt from the abstract:
Here, we comprehensively and transparently show that—in contrast to previous studies—end-of-century ocean acidification levels have negligible effects on important behaviours of coral reef fishes, such as the avoidance of chemical cues from predators, fish activity levels and behavioural lateralization (left–right turning preference). Using data simulations, we additionally show that the large effect sizes and small within-group variances that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable. Together, our findings indicate that the reported effects of ocean acidification on the behaviour of coral reef fishes are not reproducible, suggesting that behavioural perturbations will not be a major consequence for coral reef fishes in high CO2 oceans.
The abstract does not contain the word “fraud,” but the article contains strong suggestions of data manipulation. This was a very unusual piece for Nature to publish, given the harm it caused to a significant underpinning of the anti-fossil fuel narrative.
Here we are now, five years on. Does anything remain of the “ocean acidification” narrative as a reason to hate fossil fuels?
The past few months have seen pieces laying out the cases both for and against believing that “ocean acidification” is a significant environmental concern. On the side of “ocean acidification is really bad and scary,” I will highlight a piece by Dana Nuccitelli that appeared in something called The Invading Sea in March, title “Fossil fuel pollution’s effect on oceans comes with huge costs.” On the side of “ocean acidification is way overblown,” I will highlight a May 13, 2026 paper by van Wijngaarden, Ridd, Cornell and Happer, title “Acidification of Water by CO2.”
Nuccitelli is a frequent writer at Yale Climate Connections (yet another black eye for Yale). In Nuccitelli’s piece, he appears to have given up on trying to claim that changing pH is killing off the tropical fish. So instead, here, he emphasizes the effect on coral. He claims that “acidification” is killing off coral, but can’t attribute dying coral just to pH, so he throws in warming as well:
Florida’s barrier reef is in trouble – and it’s costing us. The reef has been experiencing a severe outbreak of stony coral tissue loss disease over the past decade. The likely cause: stress from the warming climate and acidifying waters, both the result of burning fossil fuels. . . . Human burning of fossil fuels affects Earth’s oceans via the one-two punch of warming and acidifying waters, which occurs as carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean.
No quantitative information is provided for the amount of coral loss, if any. The “likely cause” of the disease is said to be a combination of “warming” and “acidifying waters.” How does he know that? How much from each? Is there any actual proof? If so, Nuccitelli does not choose to cite it. I guess it’s just obvious to his readership.
After asserting the “likely cause,” Nuccitelli moves on to calculating the cost, not of the portion of the coral that may be lost, but of the entire tourism industry related to all the coral:
The financial stake of losing the reef is high. Florida’s coral reefs are estimated to draw in over $1 billion in tourism revenue each year, provide $650 million in flood protection benefits and support over 70,000 jobs. What’s more, coral reefs protect people and property by dissipating up to 97% of wave energy, lessening storm surges.
And then Nuccitelli goes on to rely on a recent paper from Nature Climate Change (from January 2026) that purports to calculate a new measure of “social cost of carbon” on an assumption that global warming will significantly decrease the productivity of the oceans, not just for coral, but all other life. The NCC paper does not appear to deal with the acidification issue at all.
Top Democratic officials and lawmakers are breaking with Democratic Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner as his past blunders and online history stack up.
Platner’s ascendency to the top of the ticket in Vacationland broke with the Democratic establishment in Washington, D.C., and since Maine Gov. Janet Mills exited from the race, questions about whether he is the right choice to take on Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, have exploded.
Much of that is fueled by scandals that have cropped up seemingly week after week, be it a tattoo on his chest of a Nazi symbol or inflammatory posts online.
Some in the Democratic Party warn that it’s spurring a “civil war” between the moderate and left wings of the party.
Melissa DeRosa, former New York Mayor Andrew Cuomo’s chief of staff, told Fox News’ Bret Baier that Platner’s rise and ensuing questions of his fitness as a candidate are demonstrative of the bubbling conflict within the Democratic Party.
“The main race really demonstrates the civil war that’s happening within the Democratic Party, and there are a lot of Democrats, moderate Democrats like myself, who will not cry tears should we lose Maine,” DeRosa said.
“I mean, that would be a pickup to begin with.”
Senate Democrats view Maine as one of the most viable pickup opportunities in the 2026 midterm cycle in their quest to regain control of the upper chamber.
Platner is not the candidate that party bosses wanted, but since jumping into the race last year, he has built a growing national profile that reached new heights earlier this month when he landed on the cover of Time magazine.
The left’s glamorization of political violence begins as performance, but history shows how quickly chic nihilism can become something far darker.
Brian Thompson’s shooter suspect in hostel CCTV. (security camera, Wikimedia Commons)
On the morning of May 18, 2026, on the granite steps of Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building, three chic women arranged themselves like starlets at Cannes. The heels. The practiced hip-thrust. Weight cocked to one side, chin down, eyes up. With enough mascara between them to repaint Gracie Mansion. But the most revealing part, the part that showed the most skin, was the laminated press credential blessed by the office of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. It certified they were card-carrying members of the working press. Only they were not here to cover a criminal. Luigi’s Angels, or as they call themselves, more affectionately, the Mangionistas, were there to worship a charismatic idol and to defend his violence.
Brian Thompson was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare. Was is the operative word here. He was walking to his company’s investor conference in broad daylight. A bullet went into his back. He arched and stumbled and hit the concrete hard. Then the killer stepped closer, took a look and fired again into the man’s leg. The cold December sidewalk against Thompson’s face, the blood spreading, the bystanders frozen, the normal morning around him with its coffee cups and crossing signals, while the spine that had just been torn through sent up whatever a body sends up in its last conscious minute. The shooter walked off and rode his bike through Central Park.
Outside the courthouse, the three women told reporters, breathlessly, what they thought of the dead man. “F-ck Brian Thompson,” said Ashley Rojas. “I don’t give a flying f-ck he died. F-ck his mom.”
Lena Weissbrot pronounced his two grieving children “better off without him,” told them to enjoy the “blood money,” and rated the murdered executive responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden. To watch a group of women cheer, loud and unembarrassed, for the assassination of a man who was guilty of holding a job somebody did not like looks like a crazy one-off kind of crime.
Except that it isn’t. We heard it in 1932. In Berlin.
In the breakthrough election of July 1932, British historian Dick Geary documented, some 6.5 million German women voted for the Nazis, nearly half of the party’s 13.7 million votes, and they did it even as Hitler promised to drive hundreds of thousands of them out of the workforce to make room for men. They voted in force for a movement that despised their independence. By the time the regime held power, some 13 million of Germany’s 40 million women were active in its organizations, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The surge ran strongest among young women and first-time voters who had never been political before.
That dynamic fits another electorate closer to home. Eight decades later, the CIRCLE project at Tufts University found that 82% percent of women under 30 in New York City voted for Mamdani against 65% of the men, a gap so wide it has stopped being a curiosity and become a movement, and one so 1932 that the comparison no longer feels like a coincidence. The Chicago Tribune, cabling from Paris on the German 1932 election results, described the Nazi program as “anti-Republican, anti-Semitic, and anti-capitalist.” The Nazi Party had a more official name – the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – and it ran against finance and big business as hard as it ran against Jews. Where have we heard that lately?
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who twice came in second in the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating process, calls the wealthy “the billionaire class” and says they have spent 40 years “looting the country.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells a cheering hall that “no one ever makes a billion dollars; you take a billion dollars.”
The shape is familiar: a productive people, a small moneyed few who produce nothing and drain the rest, a demand that the few be stripped and made to pay. Where the Nazi press wrote of the parasite bleeding the productive nation, the contemporary U.S. “progressive” Democratic denounces the billionaire, the corporate parasite, the bloodsucking insurer, the Wall Street ghoul. Some even go so far as to name several prominent Jews. The point is not that today’s democratic socialists are Nazis. It is the demonizing grievance that built the movement, a productive nation set against a parasitic moneyed few, is a theme. And themes recur.
Mamdani’s own record supplies the text. He spent months refusing to condemn “globalize the intifada,” conceding at last only that he would “discourage” a movement that led to the murder of so many Jews. He also had the temerity to liken the phrase to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a comparison the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum pointed out was historically outrageous and deeply offensive to survivors. He has backed the boycott of Israel since college. He declines to affirm Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. He told a Democratic Socialists panel that when the boot of the NYPD is on a New Yorker’s neck, “it’s been laced by the IDF.” It would be naive to call this the language of the death camp. But the same office that parses Israel so carefully also handed a press badge to the woman who said, “I don’t give a flying f-ck he died.” That is not a mindset interested in sensible solutions.
Mamdani’s own wife supplies more of it. Rama Duwaji, the illustrator he married in early 2025, has been documented liking posts that celebrated the October 7 Hamas attack and one that called the New York Times investigation into the sexual violence of that day a “mass rape hoax.” She illustrated an essay for a writer who has called Jews “vampires,” “demons,” “ghouls,” and “parasites.” The through-line runs into Luigi Mangione, the defendant who wrote in the notebook he was carrying when apprehended that the “parasites simply had it coming.” Vampires, demons, ghouls, parasites: This is not language that is merely adjacent to Nazi antisemitism. It is the same language, transcribed without a single substitution. Here is where anti-free market rhetoric and anti-Jewish hatred stop being a theory and start becoming a hit list.
In the months around Mangione’s arrest, an arsonist firebombed the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor while his family slept, for what the governor “wants to do to the Palestinian people.” A gunman shot two young Israeli embassy staffers, a couple about to be engaged, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, and chanted “Free Palestine!” as he was handcuffed by police. A week later, an Egyptian living in Colorado firebombed a march for the Israeli hostages, and an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor died of her burns. The cult of violence on the extreme American left is not a metaphor.
We call it madness because madness is consoling. Madness is rare, it is individual, it is always somebody else. But the celebration of a killing is no glitch in human nature; it is one of the oldest and most dependable things about us. It is what let Stalin starve millions and call it progress, and it has stood beneath every public stoning, every sacrifice on every altar since people first gathered to watch someone die for the good of the group. The horror is that the impulse is among the most ordinary things we do, and that it always begins with decent people deciding that the death of someone outside the circle is deserved. The women on the steps are not an aberration. They are the system’s most reliable signal of what is coming. They are not the noise. They are the tell.
The lesson is not about women or female nature. The Hausfrau who pulled the lever for Hitler and the young American who livestreams her devotion to Mangione share a single vulnerability: Under the right conditions, an otherwise non-violent woman, devoted to chic causes, will give herself completely to a charismatic man who frames killing as the solution to her perceived problems. The irony is that she often seeks liberation and ends up handing over her own agency. She is not the author of a totalitarian movement. She is its warmth, its alibi, its stooge, and she is the last to know it. That is why a press pass is not a small story. Confronted with the outrage, Abril Rios declared that no pressure would make her bow to her “oppressors.”
There may be a reason it is happening now. The world has grown too complex to hold in the head, a blur of systems and supply chains and feeds and AI trillionaires that no one can fathom, much less trace to a source, and the mind under that load looks for an exit. The simplest exit ever devised is a charismatic man who has already done the thinking, and an enemy who, conveniently, seems to deserve whatever he gets. That second half is the lie, the one that gets perpetrated every generation: the substitution of a hated group for an innocent one, the murderer dressed up as the new sheriff in town. For a moment, the mind that wants the madness to stop in a single click, a decisive ending, is the whole appeal. So we shoot Kennedy. We shoot his brother. We shoot MLK. We shoot Reagan, Ford, and Trump. The chic women applaud. This is the cult of the simple answer when the true answer has become too heavy to lift.
Karl Marx wrote that history arrives the first time as tragedy and the second as farce. Berlin in 1932 was the tragedy. Three women in heels doing a hip-thrust for the cameras on a courthouse step, badges on their chests, cheering a man who shot a father of two in the back, is the farce. But the farce is not the harmless version of the tragedy. It is the tragedy that has not yet remembered what it is. 1932 is a date. It is also a temperament, and the temperament is back.
Hong Kong has overtaken Switzerland as the world’s biggest cross-border wealth hub for the first time, as an influx of investment from the Chinese mainland helped it eclipse the traditional haven.
Wealth managers in the Chinese territory booked $2.9tn of international assets in 2025, according to estimates from the Boston Consulting Group. About 60 per cent of that came from mainland China, with BCG forecasting that the rapid increase in Asian fortunes would widen the gap between Hong Kong and Switzerland to almost $600bn by the end of the decade.
China’s growth has been bolstered by a return of equity capital markets activity in Hong Kong that has allowed companies to raise funds offshore, as well as the country’s manufacturing dominance in sectors such as electric vehicles.
But the rise of the Asian city as a cross-border hub also reflects broader shifts in global wealth flows, with clients seeking to spread their assets across multiple jurisdictions to hedge against geopolitical tensions, sanctions risks and political instability. “This is a completely new phenomenon. I haven’t seen anything like it,” said Michael Pellman Rowland at Baseline Wealth Management, a Swiss-based independent manager with global clients….
Russia is stuck on the Ukrainian battlefield and lashing out with massive strikes on Kyiv. The growing fear in European capitals is that President Vladimir Putin will try next to reshuffle the cards by expanding the conflict to Europe.
In recent weeks, Russia has made increasingly bellicose statements against the Baltic states. It has threatened to bomb “decision-making centers” in Latvia after accusing the country of hosting Ukrainian drone operators, an allegation denied by the Latvian authorities. Air-raid alarms were sounded in Lithuania last week, forcing the government into a bunker, after suspected Russian drones approached its airspace from Belarus.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has also published the addresses of companies allegedly working on drone production with Ukraine in eight European nations, warning of “unpredictable consequences” and “sharp escalation” if military assistance to Kyiv doesn’t cease.
While fears that Russia could expand the conflict to Europe aren’t new, recent developments have made them more urgent. Several European national-security officials have warned that Russia could try to test the cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization by targeting one of the Baltic nations, Swedish and Danish islands in the Baltic Sea or alliance territory in the Arctic.
“The security environment in Europe has deteriorated during the last 24 months, and we see a greater inclination from the Russian side to take greater operational risks in their hybrid operations, moving up also to kinetic elements,” Sweden’s Defense Minister Pål Jonson said in an interview. “We are cognizant that we need to be focused on strengthening our ability to deter and defend against the Russians.”
Cognizant could be heading toward one of the biggest tech layoffs of the year, following cuts at companies like Amazon and Oracle. Reports suggest the IT services firm may reduce between 12,000 and 15,000 jobs globally, although the company has not confirmed a final number.
From a US perspective, the move reflects a wider shift in how large tech and consulting companies are restructuring their workforce as clients rethink spending. While Cognizant is headquartered in the United States, most of its employees are based in India, where over 250,000 people make up the company’s largest workforce hub out of a global total of more than 357,000.
The expected layoffs are tied closely to the company’s financial planning. In its April 29 earnings update, Cognizant said it expects to spend between $230 million and $320 million on severance. That figure has led analysts to estimate the potential scale of job cuts, based on typical compensation packages offered to employees who are laid off.
Much of the impact is likely to be felt in India, where salary levels are lower compared to the US. Industry estimates suggest that severance payouts there could cover several months of pay per employee, allowing the company to stretch its budget across a large number of roles.
The restructuring is part of a broader shift in the tech services model. Industry executives say clients are moving away from the traditional pyramid structure that relies heavily on entry-level hiring. Companies are now less willing to pay for training large groups of fresh graduates, instead prioritizing more experienced talent and automation.
Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar S has also signaled that changes are coming across the organization. Speaking during the earnings call, he pointed to a move toward a “broader and shorter pyramid,” combining digital tools with human workers. The approach reflects how AI and automation are beginning to reshape hiring strategies across the global tech industry.
While the final numbers are still unclear, the direction is consistent with what’s happening across US tech. Companies are tightening costs, investing in AI, and reshaping teams, even if that means significant job cuts in the near term.
Hardly anybody is still alive today who has personal memories of the Hollywood Blacklist of the immediate post-World War II period, let alone of the rabid Communist agitation that took place in the film colony before and during the war. But all of us have lived through an era, now decades long, during which the Blacklist has been repeatedly condemned and its so-called victims celebrated. As Lloyd Billingsley writes in his richly informative new book, Hollywood Party: Stalinist Adventures in the American Movie Industry, it took scarcely any time at all after the Blacklist collapsed in 1960 for a new narrative to shape itself: omitting from the story the subversive deeds of the Communist Party, the Hollywood establishment – along with the news media, the publishing industry, and academia – recast the Blacklist as the work of evil “inquisitors” who persecuted “noble idealists.” This tale was told in any number of books with titles like Hollywood on Trial, Inquisition in Eden, and A Journal of the Plague Years.
But even more effective were the movies. The Front (1976) starred Woody Allen as a restaurant cashier who agrees to put his name on scripts by several blacklisted TV and movie writers. Significantly, as Billingsley puts it, The Front “joins the action in the early 1950s, long after the major events had passed”; in other words, we don’t see the Communist writers at Party meetings, taking orders from the Kremlin; we don’t see them cheering Moscow-choreographed violence intended to cow the studio heads; and we don’t see them plotting ruthlessly, in those wartime and prewar years, to destroy the careers of their non-Communist colleagues.
No, The Front depicts these traitors only as victims. In its closing credits, we’re not only told that it was written by Walter Bernstein, directed by Martin Ritt, and starred (among others) Zero Mostel, Herschel Bernardi, and Lloyd Gough, but also that they all were blacklisted. I was 19 when The Front came out, but already knew better than to idolize Communists; yet when I saw the movie in a Manhattan theater, the people around me lustily applauded – some of them leaping to their feet – throughout the closing credits.
During the half-century since The Front, Hollywood has memorialized the Blacklist in any number of movies and TV dramas. The slant is always the same. So are the deliberate omissions. In Hollywood Party, Billingsley tells the full story, which involves charting the ups and downs of an alphabet soup of Soviet front groups and telling innumerable anecdotes in which patriots like Ronald Reagan and Olivia de Havilland take on Stalinists like Will Geer (later the beloved Grandpa Walton on The Waltons) and Lionel Stander (“the Party’s ‘model actor,’” later the gravel-voiced chauffeur on Hart to Hart). To try to recount all the specifics in the space of a review would be impossible; better to focus on a representative sampling of the very many fascinating stories, details, and quotations that Billingsley serves up.
For instance, Billingsley writes that while the Communist community in Hollywood shrank to almost nothing after the newly installed Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev publicly revealed the extent of Stalin’s villainy, a few true believers remained. Writers Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes) and Bertolt Brecht (Hangmen Also Die!) and singer Paul Robeson (Show Boat) “shrugged off the Khrushchev revelations,” reports Billingsley, while novelist Howard Fast’s resignation from the Party left Dalton Trumbo (who had adapted Fast’s Spartacus for the big screen) “deeply annoyed.” Ella Winter, wife of Communist screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, shifted her loyalty from Stalin to Mao Tse-Tung.
And Hellman’s fealty to Moscow outlasted pretty much everybody else’s: “In 1969, after the Soviets crushed the Prague Spring, Hellman attacked novelist Anatoli Kuznetzov for fleeing the USSR and seeking asylum in England.” When Kuznetzov tried to explain to Hellman that her beloved Kremlin had murdered tens of millions, put innocents on trial, and committed opponents to mental institutions, Hellman apparently chose not to reply. And pretty much nobody minded her stalwart Stalinism: until her death in 1984, she was treated almost universally as a free-speech icon.
After the Blacklist was over, in fact, the politically sane denizens of the Dream Factory were quick to forgive the machinations of the diehard Communists among them and even to help put their careers back together. Actor Jeff Corey, for example, later remembered the kindness of John Wayne and Pat Boone, both famous conservatives. By contrast, the distinguished director Elia Kazan (Gentleman’s Agreement, A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden, Splendor in the Grass, On the Waterfront), was treated in Tinseltown like the worst kind of criminal because he’d committed what the film community came to regard as the ultimate offense, “naming names”: in other words, having flirted with Communism and recognized its utter depravity, he decided to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee which film-industry machers had been secret servants of Stalin. Living until 2003, Kazan was denied one major lifetime-achievement award after another: when he was short-listed for recognition by the American Film Institute, producer Gail Ann Hurd exclaimed: “we can’t give this award to a man who named names!” Finally, in 1999, in response to an appeal by Karl Malden, whom Kazan had cast in On the Waterfront, the Motion Picture Academy agreed to pay tribute to him – a decision that enraged many of Hollywood’s veteran Reds.
As Charlton Heston commented, “It was a return to Stalinism.” And Kazan is far from the only heretic who has been punished in this post-Blacklist era. Indeed, while the original Blacklist lasted barely a decade, the period since it ended has gone on for more than half-century, and has been a time during which, as Billingsley reminds us, Hollywood has released scores of movies about the Nazis but hardly any about “Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine, the Moscow trials, the Nazi-Soviet Pact,” or for that matter about any aspect of Soviet Communism. It is telling that the very best movie yet made about life behind the Iron Curtain, The Lives of Others (2006), is from Germany. After 9/11, I might add, virtually all the Hollywood films about Afghanistan and Iraq were anti-American.
Yes, Billingsley credits Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015) for showing “footage of the Berlin Wall under construction and border guards gunning down those fleeing to freedom”; he also praises other movies, including The Secret Ways (1961), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), and American Rhapsody (2001), for including brief glimpses of life under Communism. But nothing on his list remotely compares to The Lives of Others. He points out that while a sympathetic film biography of Reagan (which, though excellent, was critically savaged) didn’t come along until 2024, Trumbo (2015) lauded the devout, richly rewarded Stalinist – who survived the Blacklist very comfortably, thanks to fronts like the one played by Woody Allen – as a free-speech martyr. It’s all lies, lies, lies, and Billingsley exposes them valiantly one by one. But don’t expect this terrific, truth-telling tome to be made into a major-studio movie anytime soon.
The numbers don’t lie. Democrats are staring down the barrel of another midterm cycle where their secular base simply isn’t big enough to win in the places that matter. So they’ve decided to stop pretending and start poaching. Not with policy changes or soul-searching. With collars. With Bibles. With men and women who once stood in pulpits now running for Congress and statewide office as proud Democrats.
Progressive faith networks like Vote Common Good are tracking roughly 30 white Christian clergy (mostly from mainline Protestant denominations) seeking Democrat nominations this cycle. That’s no coincidence. It’s a deliberate surge aimed straight at the heart of Republican strength: the religious voter. White evangelicals, practicing Protestants, and traditional Catholics have anchored the GOP for generations. Democrats know it. They’ve studied the polls. And instead of reforming their agenda on life, family, and religious liberty, they’re trying to rent the pews.
Look at the map. In Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, a Trump stronghold, Presbyterian pastor Lindsay James is on the ballot. Former United Methodist minister Clint Twedt-Ball is right there with her. Over in the 3rd District, ordained Lutheran minister and state Senator Sarah Trone Garriott is pushing the same line. Three pastors in one battleground state, all Democrats, all framing bigger government, open borders, and progressive priorities as pure Gospel.
Up in Alaska’s at-large House seat, Presbyterian pastor Matt Schultz campaigns on feeding the hungry and standing up to “bullies” ‒– code, of course, for anyone who dares defend biological sex or parental rights in schools. In Kansas, the senior pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the country, Adam Hamilton, with his 24,000-member congregation, is running for Senate as an “independent-minded Democrat.” These aren’t outliers. They’re the vanguard of a strategy that treats faith communities like enemy territory to be infiltrated
Up in Alaska’s at-large House seat, Presbyterian pastor Matt Schultz campaigns on feeding the hungry and standing up to “bullies” ‒– code, of course, for anyone who dares defend biological sex or parental rights in schools. In Kansas, the senior pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the country, Adam Hamilton, with his 24,000-member congregation, is running for Senate as an “independent-minded Democrat.” These aren’t outliers. They’re the vanguard of a strategy that treats faith communities like enemy territory to be infiltrated rather than ignored.
This is wedge politics at its most cynical. Democrats aren’t trying to win over the core of the religious vote by changing their platform. They’re trying to peel off the margins (suburban moderates, younger mainline believers, anyone who might be tired of the culture war headlines) by offering a permission structure wrapped in Scripture. Quote Matthew 25 about the “least of these,” talk endlessly about poverty programs and immigration compassion, and quietly glide past the party’s ironclad commitment to abortion on demand, boys in girls’ locker rooms, and federal pressure on churches and schools.
The infrastructure is already built. Groups like Vote Common Good and the Interfaith Alliance provide the training, the playbooks, and the turnout machinery. They coach these candidates to counter the “Christian nationalism” narrative the left loves to hype. The message is simple: You can vote your faith and vote blue. Just don’t look too closely at the rest of the Democrat agenda.
Here’s the problem for them: real faith voters see the disconnect. White Protestants still lean Republican by nearly 60-40. Traditional Catholics hold a similar edge. The religiously unaffiliated crowd that forms the Democrats’ reliable core simply doesn’t deliver majorities in the districts that decide the House and key Senate seats. That’s why this clergy surge exists. It’s an admission that the old secular playbook is failing in flyover country.
the Presbyterian seminarian running for Texas Senate, is the poster child for the strategy. He brandishes his faith credentials while twisting Scripture to bless every left-wing priority from “reproductive justice” to expansive welfare. His record shows exactly where the priorities lie: rainbow flags at church events, sanctuary policies for illegal immigrants, and silence on the biblical view of life and marriage. Mainline denominations that have already drifted far from historic Christian orthodoxy on these issues are now the perfect recruiting ground for Democratic campaigns.
But evangelicals and traditional Catholics ‒– the backbone of the religious electorate ‒– aren’t buying the act. They remember who stood firm when the culture demanded surrender on the unborn, on boys competing against girls, on parents’ rights to raise their kids without government indoctrination. They know selective Bible quoting doesn’t erase a party platform that treats religious liberty as a loophole and the nuclear family as outdated.
Republicans shouldn’t overreact. Panic plays into the hands of the strategists behind this move. Instead, expose it for what it is: a façade. Double down on the substantive defense of life, conscience protections, parental authority, and limited government ‒– the very principles that align with the historic American understanding of faith and freedom. The faithful aren’t looking for politicians who sound pious on the stump. They’re looking for leaders who actually deliver results that protect their churches, their families, and their communities.
This isn’t the first time the left has tried to co-opt religious language. Progressive “social gospel” efforts have been around for decades, and they’ve consistently failed to move the needle among the devout. Raphael Warnock’s success in Georgia is the exception that proves the rule ‒ it relied on heavy black church turnout in a state trending left, not a broad conversion of white evangelicals or traditional Catholics.
The 2026 midterms will be the test. Will a handful of these pastor candidates flip a few suburban seats by confusing just enough voters? Maybe in isolated spots. But the broader religious electorate remains solidly grounded in the values that built this republic. Life. Liberty. Family. Limited government. The God who doesn’t change with polling data or party platforms.
Democrats can field all the clerical collars they want. They can quote the verses they like and ignore the ones they don’t. The American people of faith have seen this movie before. They know the difference between authentic conviction and a calculated costume change. The pews aren’t for rent. And the wolves wearing collars are going to find out exactly how many believers are still paying attention.
Mike Robertson is a contributor to American Thinker. Follow him on X at @Mike_for_MAGA and Reddit.
There’s an ancient, almost surely apocryphal story about a dog food company executive convening a big sales meeting. A very short version has the exec running through all of the company’s advantages: the best sales team, the best advertising, the best packaging, etc. He then irately asks, “So why aren’t we selling more dog food?”
After a long silence, a small voice from the back ventures a guess: “Maybe the dogs don’t like it.”
The story is a cliché, but a useful one in business and politics. For instance, the prelaunch internal name for Netflix was “Kibble,” a reminder that the customer actually had to like the product itself.
The Democratic Party would be well-advised to launch its own Operation Kibble.
There were hopes — and fears — that the recently released Democratic “autopsy” of their 2024 election defeat would be the beginning of just such an effort. Every Democratic faction wanted a report that either ratified their ideological commitments or proved that the party brass was hostile toward them.
Everyone was disappointed. The autopsy wasn’t a complete mess. It was an incomplete mess, with countless blank sections including a missing conclusion. Also, absent: any mention of President Biden’s age, Kamala Harris’ myriad shortcomings or such relevant issues as inflation, immigration, Israel or politically toxic culture war issues.
There were some defensible points scattered across the report’s nearly 200 pages; the party doesn’t try to win rural voters, it relies too much on identity politics, etc.
Still, critics across the ideological spectrum have closed the partisan divide to tear it apart like so many polar bears agreeably sharing a whale carcass. With so much to feed on, why squabble?
But there’s one criticism I haven’t seen that gets to the heart of the Democrats’ kibble problem. Simply put, the ideological activist base can’t accept that the dogs don’t actually like what they’re being served. This denial has a long history.
From the 1930s until the mid-1980s, Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans, sometimes by more than two to one. And long after that, Democrats still usually had the edge. Republican presidents — Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, even the Bushes — earned victories by winning over some Democrats, and starting in the 1990s, Democrat-friendly independents. But Democrats clung to the idea that Democrats alone were the path to victory.
There’s an ancient, almost surely apocryphal story about a dog food company executive convening a big sales meeting. A very short version has the exec running through all of the company’s advantages: the best sales team, the best advertising, the best packaging, etc. He then irately asks, “So why aren’t we selling more dog food?”
After a long silence, a small voice from the back ventures a guess: “Maybe the dogs don’t like it.”
The story is a cliché, but a useful one in business and politics. For instance, the prelaunch internal name for Netflix was “Kibble,” a reminder that the customer actually had to like the product itself.
The Democratic Party would be well-advised to launch its own Operation Kibble.
There were hopes — and fears — that the recently released Democratic “autopsy” of their 2024 election defeat would be the beginning of just such an effort. Every Democratic faction wanted a report that either ratified their ideological commitments or proved that the party brass was hostile toward them.
Everyone was disappointed. The autopsy wasn’t a complete mess. It was an incomplete mess, with countless blank sections including a missing conclusion. Also, absent: any mention of President Biden’s age, Kamala Harris’ myriad shortcomings or such relevant issues as inflation, immigration, Israel or politically toxic culture war issues.
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There were some defensible points scattered across the report’s nearly 200 pages; the party doesn’t try to win rural voters, it relies too much on identity politics, etc.
Still, critics across the ideological spectrum have closed the partisan divide to tear it apart like so many polar bears agreeably sharing a whale carcass. With so much to feed on, why squabble?
But there’s one criticism I haven’t seen that gets to the heart of the Democrats’ kibble problem. Simply put, the ideological activist base can’t accept that the dogs don’t actually like what they’re being served. This denial has a long history.
From the 1930s until the mid-1980s, Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans, sometimes by more than two to one. And long after that, Democrats still usually had the edge. Republican presidents — Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, even the Bushes — earned victories by winning over some Democrats, and starting in the 1990s, Democrat-friendly independents. But Democrats clung to the idea that Democrats alone were the path to victory.
Bill Clinton recognized this era was ending, and instead crafted an appeal to the moderate and conservative voters the Democratic Party had been hemorrhaging. His presidency is not remembered fondly by today’s ardent progressives.
Electoral math is only part of the story. Ever since FDR’s administration, both parties have organized around an enduring myth of American politics: If everyone voted, Democrats would win. This idea more than any other explains why Republicans favor tighter controls around voting and Democrats want looser ones.
This idea rests on a lot of different assumptions. First, it seemed plausible back in the days when Democrats outnumbered Republicans. There’s also a kind of Marx-ish assumption that non-voters are a reserve army of the dispossessed, the marginal, the oppressed. As President Obama once put it when making the case for mandatory voting, “The people who tend not to vote are young; they’re lower income; they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups.”
Another related assumption by Democrats: We’re obviously right, so we just have to do better at getting our message out. Inversely, the Republicans are obviously wrong, so they must have exploited an unfair advantage to win, in terms of money, media and mobilization.
There’s an ancient, almost surely apocryphal story about a dog food company executive convening a big sales meeting. A very short version has the exec running through all of the company’s advantages: the best sales team, the best advertising, the best packaging, etc. He then irately asks, “So why aren’t we selling more dog food?”
After a long silence, a small voice from the back ventures a guess: “Maybe the dogs don’t like it.”
The story is a cliché, but a useful one in business and politics. For instance, the prelaunch internal name for Netflix was “Kibble,” a reminder that the customer actually had to like the product itself.
The Democratic Party would be well-advised to launch its own Operation Kibble.
There were hopes — and fears — that the recently released Democratic “autopsy” of their 2024 election defeat would be the beginning of just such an effort. Every Democratic faction wanted a report that either ratified their ideological commitments or proved that the party brass was hostile toward them.
Everyone was disappointed. The autopsy wasn’t a complete mess. It was an incomplete mess, with countless blank sections including a missing conclusion. Also, absent: any mention of President Biden’s age, Kamala Harris’ myriad shortcomings or such relevant issues as inflation, immigration, Israel or politically toxic culture war issues.
There were some defensible points scattered across the report’s nearly 200 pages; the party doesn’t try to win rural voters, it relies too much on identity politics, etc.
Still, critics across the ideological spectrum have closed the partisan divide to tear it apart like so many polar bears agreeably sharing a whale carcass. With so much to feed on, why squabble?
But there’s one criticism I haven’t seen that gets to the heart of the Democrats’ kibble problem. Simply put, the ideological activist base can’t accept that the dogs don’t actually like what they’re being served. This denial has a long history.
From the 1930s until the mid-1980s, Democrats significantly outnumbered Republicans, sometimes by more than two to one. And long after that, Democrats still usually had the edge. Republican presidents — Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, even the Bushes — earned victories by winning over some Democrats, and starting in the 1990s, Democrat-friendly independents. But Democrats clung to the idea that Democrats alone were the path to victory.
Bill Clinton recognized this era was ending, and instead crafted an appeal to the moderate and conservative voters the Democratic Party had been hemorrhaging. His presidency is not remembered fondly by today’s ardent progressives.
Electoral math is only part of the story. Ever since FDR’s administration, both parties have organized around an enduring myth of American politics: If everyone voted, Democrats would win. This idea more than any other explains why Republicans favor tighter controls around voting and Democrats want looser ones.
This idea rests on a lot of different assumptions. First, it seemed plausible back in the days when Democrats outnumbered Republicans. There’s also a kind of Marx-ish assumption that non-voters are a reserve army of the dispossessed, the marginal, the oppressed. As President Obama once put it when making the case for mandatory voting, “The people who tend not to vote are young; they’re lower income; they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups.”
Another related assumption by Democrats: We’re obviously right, so we just have to do better at getting our message out. Inversely, the Republicans are obviously wrong, so they must have exploited an unfair advantage to win, in terms of money, media and mobilization.
When right-wing talk radio seemed to help the GOP, the left concluded all they needed was their own talk radio, and Air America was born. When Fox News seemed to fuel GOP success, Current TV was launched, and MSNBC was revamped as left-wing Fox News. Several progressive think tanks were born out of envy for conservative think tanks.
Add in the complementary myth that the candidate with the most money wins, and you can start to appreciate the “cope” of the Democratic worldview.
The recent quest to stand up left-wing “podcast bros” — despite the fact that many such bros had been left-wing until recently (remember, Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020) — is another of numerous examples.
The autopsy offers more of the same, arguing that Democrats need to copy the “always on” media and activist infrastructure of the right — the Koch networks, Turning Point USA, etc. “Democrats and allies must consider how to match and exceed these investments.”
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 