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DAVID MARCUS: The law comes for Southern Poverty Law Center's ideological vigilantes

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:24:27 -0400

This week, the Department of Justice dropped a bombshell indictment alleging not just that the "anti-racism" organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been running a spy ring, but that it has actually paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the very White supremacist groups it claims to be fighting.

It truly could be a Dave Chappelle sketch, right down to the fact that the SPLC funded, in part, the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which the lie that President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis "very fine people" was born.

Trump never called the White supremacists "very fine people," but it turns out the SPLC was handing them bags of cash.

The biggest takeaway from this scandal is that actual racism is so scant in our society that the SPLC has to fund it to find it.

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But even without the payouts, they have been little more than an ideological vigilante group for decades.

There may have been a time in the 1970s when the SPLC did important work infiltrating and exposing racist organizations, but since at least the turn of the century, the group's main purpose has been to get conservatives canceled — often through dubious connections.

The way this works is that the SPLC keeps a watchlist of individuals or organizations that they say are hateful. Mind you, no real definition of what is and is not a hate group is actually offered; it's just whatever they say it is. And it's almost always conservative.

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Once a person or group finds themselves on this blacklist, if you will, the consequences have been grave. In some professions, like academia or publishing, being labeled as hateful by the SPLC is a clear barrier to employment.

Likewise, any organization — even one as harmless as Moms for Liberty — that gets a hate group designation is always introduced or mentioned in the media with the grave warning, "... has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center."

What makes this ideological vigilantism is that while the First Amendment protects Americans from the state punishing our free speech, the SPLC, through the myriad institutions it has captured, metes out punishment for speech on a regular basis.

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For more than 25 years, this group has operated as a kind of private thought police — the rent-a-cops of American discourse — who ban conservatives from the conversation by smearing them, while progressives like Hasan Piker talk about killing the rich on podcasts.

Calling somebody a bigot, hateful or a White supremacist is a social scarlet letter in our culture. It doesn’t just mean that the person shouldn’t get a job or publish a book; it means they should be shunned in their personal and professional lives.

At its worst, the SPLC’s defamation of everyday conservatives as racists may even contribute to violence. After all, the organization absurdly labeled Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA as hateful before a gunman silenced Charlie forever.

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You see, the SPLC’s mission was once to protect those who were dehumanized in our society, but today, they do the dehumanizing. Showing up on their watchlists doesn’t just put a black mark on one’s resume. It puts a target on one’s back.

Whether the SPLC’s shenanigans turn out to be criminal or not, the organization has been exposed as a fraud shop. The SPLC isn’t cracking open cases against criminal organizations. It's just censoring ideas.

Outside of prisons, there is no massive network of White supremacists that the SPLC needs to infiltrate and investigate. It's all stuff and nonsense.

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The SPLC has been trading on its once excellent reputation for decades now. Experts pretend it is nonpartisan, when, in fact, today, it only exists to silence conservative voices.

Sadly, the organization no longer deserves the trust that our institutions have put in it to be a fair arbiter of racism and bigotry. In fact, it may be responsible for more racism than it actually fights.

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It is time for the SPLC and all of its malicious smears to take their place in the dustbin of history and for Americans of good will to have free conversations without facing punishment from a fake civil rights organization.

And honestly, it really does show just how far our nation has come in conquering bigotry.

KEN CUCCINELLI: Virginia voted yes, will the courts vote the same way?

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:23:12 -0400

On April 21, Virginia voters narrowly approved a referendum to let the Democrat-controlled General Assembly redraw the state’s congressional map, replacing districts drawn by the bipartisan commission voters themselves created in 2020 by a huge 2 to 1 margin. The margin on this week’s referendum was slim — roughly 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent. But the vote, dramatic as it was, is not the final chapter. Three lawsuits, raising four distinct (state) constitutional challenges, are already in courts. And the institution that will ultimately decide whether this referendum stands is not the United States Supreme Court. It is the Supreme Court of Virginia.

All of the challenges here are rooted entirely in the Virginia Constitution — specifically, in whether the General Assembly followed Virginia’s own rules for amending its Constitution. This fight begins and ends in Richmond.

The first two challenges, already before the Virginia Supreme Court, attack the process by which the amendment received its first passage on October 31, 2025. Virginia’s Constitution, in Article XII, Section 1, prescribes a specific two-step process for amendments. A proposed amendment must first pass both chambers of the General Assembly, then there must be an intervening election. After that intervening election, and a second passage at the subsequent session, the amendment goes before voters.

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The challengers argue that two violations took place regarding the first passage of the amendment. The first passage did not occur during a proper session of the General Assembly. It took place during a special session originally convened by then-Governor Youngkin in 2024 to address a budget dispute. The "Yes" men argue that session was technically never adjourned — it was kept open for nearly two years — and Democrats used it to pass the redistricting amendment. Opponents contend this exceeded the scope of the special session’s call, which was limited to budget matters. Expanding it to encompass a constitutional amendment on redistricting would have required a two-thirds vote that never occurred. A Tazewell County circuit judge agreed, declaring the action "void, ab initio" — void from the beginning — under Article IV, Section 6, and Article V, Section 5, of the Virginia Constitution.

The second procedural challenge goes to the heart of Article XII’s timing requirements. Because first passage occurred during the 2025 election rather than before a general election, challengers argue there was no intervening election between the first and second passages. The entire point of the intervening-election requirement is to give voters a voice — a chance to weigh in on the legislators who will cast the decisive second vote. That democratic safeguard, opponents say, was circumvented.

At the time of first passage on October 31, 2025, over one million Virginians had already voted in the 2025 election — the same election the "Yes" men want to legally treat as the required ‘intervening election.’

A third challenge was heard today in Tazewell County Circuit Court. It involves Article XII, Section 1’s mandate that a proposed amendment may not be submitted to voters "sooner than ninety days after final passage by the General Assembly." The question is straightforward: did ninety days actually elapse between the second passage and the commencement of voting on the referendum? Challengers say it did not, and that this is not a technicality — it is a bright-line constitutional requirement.

Second passage occurred on January 19, 2026. Open voting in Virginia’s 45-day election began on March 6, 2026. You do the math. The last day to vote was Tuesday, April 21st, so the "Yes" men will argue that what counts is that 90 days elapsed between second passage and election day — April 21st. The Judge in Tazewell ruled today that the 90-day requirement was not complied with, and so, as of this writing, he has enjoined the certification of the referendum. Like all other matters, this will ultimately be decided by the Virginia Supreme Court.

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The fourth challenge takes aim at the proposed map itself. In Richmond Circuit Court a hearing was held on Monday and a ruling is pending. Challengers argue that the proposed congressional districts violate Article II, Section 6, of the Virginia Constitution, which requires that "every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory." The compactness challenge is independent of the procedural claims—even if the amendment survives the Article XII challenges, the maps must still pass constitutional muster on their own terms. And these may be the most extremely gerrymandered maps in modern Virginia history.

So, what’s next? Based on ancient Virginia precedent, the Virginia Supreme Court allowed the vote to proceed but made clear it would take up the constitutional questions afterward. Briefs have been filed or are due shortly. The Tazewell and Richmond circuit court rulings will surely be appealed, funneling everything upward to the same seven justices in Richmond.

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If the Virginia Supreme Court strikes down the amendment on any of the three procedural grounds, the referendum result is nullified. The bipartisan commission’s maps would remain in effect for 2026 and beyond. If the court upholds the amendment process but strikes down the maps on compactness grounds, the General Assembly would presumably need to draw new, less extreme maps. And if the court upholds everything, the new Democratic-drawn districts would reshape Virginia’s congressional delegation heading into the 2026 midterms.

Virginia’s Constitution has rules about how it may be changed, and those rules exist to prevent the kind of rushed, extreme rewrite that occurred here. Now it is up to the Virginia Supreme Court to decide whether the process that produced this referendum honored those rules — or broke them. Stay tuned!

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America's power grid, food supply and more are under threat from drones

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:00:46 -0400

Recent drone incursions over some of America’s most sensitive military installations reveal a troubling reality: even hardened, high-priority sites are no longer immune to advanced drones. Protecting these bases is essential – but if adversaries can penetrate them, it suggests the civilian infrastructure that we rely on every day is far more vulnerable than we are prepared to admit.

Cheap, commercially accessible drones are reshaping conflict abroad while exposing this dangerous truth at home. America’s greatest vulnerability is no longer confined to its borders. It is embedded in the infrastructure that underpins daily life: airports, energy grids, data centers and ports. This is America’s soft underbelly, and it is increasingly exposed.

We write from two perspectives shaped by this threat. One of us has spent four decades in aerospace and defense and now leads a company building counter-drone systems, witnessing firsthand how quickly these technologies evolve and how creatively they are used. The other served in Congress on the House Intelligence Committee and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, helping shape policies to confront emerging threats before they reach U.S. soil.

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What we are seeing is not theoretical. It is a clear and accelerating trend.

Inexpensive drones now surveil targets, deliver contraband and carry explosive payloads with precision. They are adaptable, difficult to detect and easy to scale. Just as important, they lower the barrier to entry. Capabilities once reserved for nation-states are now within reach of terrorists, sleeper cells, criminal groups and individuals.

That reality should change how we think about homeland security.

The United States has made extraordinary investments to deter high-end threats. Our military remains the most capable in the world with unmatched global reach, from carrier strike groups to next-generation aircraft and missile defense systems.

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But those systems were built for a different layer of the threat environment.

America’s air defenses were designed to track and defeat missiles and aircraft, not small drones flying just above the ground. That gap is now one of the most exposed layers in our national security architecture.

Complicating the challenge is the legal environment. Much of the airspace where drones operate overlaps with civilian jurisdictions, where countermeasures are tightly restricted. In many cases, federal law limits who can detect, track or disable a drone, even in sensitive areas.

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In today’s environment, it’s often easier to buy and operate a drone than it is to legally stop one. This isn’t just a military problem. It’s a domestic one. Across the country, critical infrastructure operates with limited protection against low-altitude threats. At the same time, the domestic drone ecosystem is large, growing and heavily reliant on foreign-manufactured hardware.

This creates a difficult reality for infrastructure operators. Airports, ports and energy facilities must maintain safety and continuity, yet most lack the authority to act against a drone threat.

A drone does not need to destroy a facility to have impact. It only needs to disrupt one. A temporary shutdown at a port, airport or power substation can ripple across supply chains, economic activity and public confidence.

Recent incidents on U.S. soil underscore both the urgency of the threat and the gaps that remain. Unauthorized drones penetrated the airspace over Barksdale Air Force Base, forcing operational disruptions. Around the same time, U.S. Northern Command confirmed drone incursions over another strategic installation during the opening hours of Operation Epic Fury.

If this can happen at sensitive military installations, it should change how we think about civilian infrastructure that was never designed for this threat.

Washington has begun to respond, though unevenly. The Trump administration established Joint Interagency Task Force 401 to bring together the Departments of War, Homeland Security and Justice, and other agencies under a single operational framework for counter-drone efforts. Congress also expanded counter-UAS authorities in the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, creating a pathway for broader deployment of defensive technologies.

These are necessary steps, but they aren’t sufficient. Drone technology is advancing faster than the legal frameworks needed to deploy counter-UAS technology at scale.

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There is no single solution to defeat every drone threat. Effective defense requires a layered approach combining detection, tracking, identification, and mitigation. Within that framework, radio-frequency-based systems offer a practical foundation: cost-effective, capable, and scalable.

More broadly, the United States needs a shift in mindset. Counter-drone capability should not be treated as a niche tool reserved for war zones. It should be understood more like cybersecurity: an essential, always-on layer built into critical systems.

Major events will always require heightened security, but the greater risk lies in persistent targets – the infrastructure that powers the economy and supports daily life. These systems require continuous protection against an evolving threat.

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Other nations are investing accordingly. The United States has the technology and capacity to respond. What is needed now is urgency. The threat is not distant. It is not hypothetical. And it will not fade.

Our soft underbelly is exposed. We shouldn’t wait for an attack on American soil to make that obvious.

Steve Haro is CEO of WhiteFox Defense Technologies, an American counter-drone company.

Finish the job: Why a half war with Iran is the most dangerous outcome

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 07:00:54 -0400

President Donald Trump made a difficult but ultimately correct decision in striking the Islamic Republic. For years, the regime’s nuclear advances, missile expansion and regional terrorism were allowed to grow while the world hesitated. At home, it carried out one of the most brutal crackdowns on street protesters in modern Iranian history. None of this was theoretical. The regime was becoming more dangerous by the year.

The strikes changed that trajectory. Iran suffered serious military losses. Its nuclear infrastructure was heavily damaged. Its missile capacity was sharply reduced. Senior figures were eliminated. For the first time in years, the regime was forced onto the defensive.

That alone is not victory.

The real danger now is not the war itself, but how it ends. A half-finished war gives the Islamic Republic what it has always relied on. Time. Time to rebuild its capabilities, reassert control at home and present survival as strength.

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That is already what Tehran is trying to do.

The regime is acting as if it has absorbed the blow without changing course. It has not stepped back from its nuclear posture or its regional ambitions. Instead, it is shifting from direct confrontation to leverage, most notably through the Strait of Hormuz.

This is familiar territory for Iran. When under pressure, it raises the cost for everyone else. It disrupts shipping, creates uncertainty in energy markets and turns that pressure into bargaining power. We are already seeing early signs of that shift, alongside new demands from Iranian officials, including the release of blocked assets before negotiations even begin.

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This is less a negotiating position than an attempt to extract concessions after taking a hit.

And it highlights the central issue. Iran is not offering an off-ramp. It is testing whether the United States wants a real outcome or just a pause that looks like de-escalation.

Inside Iran, the mood is more straightforward than many assume. People may not support widespread strikes on infrastructure, but their bigger fear is not escalation. It is regime survival. After everything that has happened, the idea that the Islamic Republic could once again absorb pressure and emerge intact is what worries many the most.

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Iranians have seen this pattern before, which is exactly why so many are uneasy now.

The regime’s strategy has always been patience. It absorbs pressure, waits out political cycles in Washington and re-emerges when the moment is favorable. A temporary concession today often leads to renewed escalation later.

This is also what makes the regime different. Islamist systems with apocalyptic worldviews tend to have a higher tolerance for pain and loss. Their resilience is not just institutional, it is ideological. That resilience cannot simply be tested. It has to be broken.

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That is why stopping now would be a mistake. It would allow the regime to turn survival into recovery, and recovery into renewed strength.

If the goal is to truly neutralize the threat, then six measures matter.

First, Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile must be removed from the country. As long as it remains inside Iran, the nuclear issue is not resolved. It is delayed.

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Second, the military operation should decimate the regime’s ballistic missile arsenals, launchers and missile and drone production facilities.

Third, the Strait of Hormuz should reopen but not through negotiations and diplomacy; it should reopen through military force and decimation of Tehran’s capability to use the threat of closure in the future.

Fourth, the regime’s ability to generate oil revenue must be constrained. Without oil money, which generates a large portion of hard currency under direct control of the government, its military recovery and internal repression become much harder.

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Fifth, pressure on the regime’s leadership structure must continue. This is not about symbolism. It is about breaking the chain of command and the sense of untouchability that sustains it. This should include military, political and economic leadership. Ideological regimes do not respond to pressure the way normal states do. They adapt, absorb and continue unless their core structures are disrupted.

Sixth, the regime’s oppression forces must be targeted and degraded. The Israeli initiative to target the security checkpoints was important and effective. The regime uses its oppressive forces to terrorize the people. The terrorizers should feel the terror, the hunters should feel haunted.

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If the war stops here, the regime survives with fewer resources but with its core intact. It will rebuild. It will reassert control. And the next confrontation will come under worse conditions.

Trump was right to act. But acting is only half the equation. What matters now is whether the outcome matches the decision.

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Right now, the United States still holds the advantage. Iran is weakened, exposed and on the defensive. This is the moment to translate that position into a lasting result.

Because unfinished wars do not end. They pause and return later on worse terms.

Navid Mohebbi is an independent Iran expert living in Washington, D.C., and an advisor to the Iran Prosperity Project. Follow him on X: @navidmohebbi.

The Iran ceasefire was just extended. The real test for Washington starts now

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:00:29 -0400

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he would extend the ceasefire with Iran — with no set deadline — until Tehran’s leaders can "come up with a unified proposal." That announcement landed hours after Vice President JD Vance’s trip to Islamabad for a second round of peace talks was canceled without explanation, after Iranian officials told U.S. counterparts through Pakistani intermediaries that they would not appear at the table. Trump had said that very morning he did not want to extend. By Tuesday evening, he did.

The extension may have been unavoidable. What happened in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday makes clear exactly what Washington bought.

A Necessary Word About Our Military

Before addressing what comes next, one point must be stated plainly.

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The United States military performed with exceptional professionalism and precision. From naval forces operating in the confined waters of the Strait of Hormuz to air crews executing complex strike missions across 55 days of conflict, our forces imposed actual costs on a dangerous adversary. They disrupted Iranian capabilities, demonstrated American reach and restored a measure of deterrence that had eroded over decades.

That performance should not be minimized. But military excellence does not automatically produce strategic resolution — and the IRGC’s response to the ceasefire extension proves the point.

The IRGC’s Answer

Wednesday was the founding anniversary of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran’s government chose to mark it not with diplomatic gestures, but with an unmistakable message.

The IRGC seized two vessels — the MSC Francesca and the Epaminodes — detaining them for what it called operating without authorization and manipulating navigation systems. A commander in the IRGC’s Aerospace Force warned Gulf neighbors that if their land or facilities were used against Iran, they should "say goodbye to oil production in the Middle East region," specifically naming sites in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. On Tuesday night, as the extension was announced, Iranian state media wheeled out a ballistic missile in Tehran’s Revolution Square, with similar displays in multiple cities. The IRGC marked its founding anniversary with a formal statement declaring it was "at the peak of readiness" and would "inflict crushing blows beyond the enemy’s imagination on their remaining assets in the region." On Wednesday morning, at least three container ships were struck by gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in the strait, with a Liberia-flagged vessel sustaining heavy damage to its bridge.

This is what a ceasefire looks like when one party treats the pause as preparation.

A Fractured Government Cannot Sign a Durable Deal

Trump’s announcement cited Iran’s "seriously fractured" government as the reason for the open-ended extension — Washington is waiting for Tehran to coalesce around a single position. That framing reflects a genuine intelligence assessment. Iran’s civilian negotiators, including Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, reportedly favored continuing talks. The IRGC refused, blocking further negotiations while the U.S. naval blockade persists.

A fractured government is not an opening. It is a warning.

The IRGC does not negotiate. It controls the Strait of Hormuz, commands Iran’s missile arsenal, and runs the proxy network from Baghdad to Beirut. Any deal that Araghchi or Ghalibaf signs is only as durable as IRGC compliance — and the IRGC answered the ceasefire extension with seized vessels, missile parades and threats to Gulf energy infrastructure.

Mahdi Mohammadi, senior advisor to Ghalibaf, dismissed Trump’s announcement, saying it "has no meaning" and that "the continuation of the blockade is no different from bombing." That is not a negotiating posture. That is the hardline wing of Tehran speaking through a civilian mouthpiece.

The Blockade Paradox

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Trump announced the extension and was explicit: the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports continues. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it plainly — the Iranian regime "must be held accountable for its extortion of global energy markets." The day of Trump’s announcement, Brent crude surged past $101 a barrel. The EU energy commissioner warned earlier this week that Europe faces a difficult summer of fuel shortages, adding that even in the best-case scenario, recovering pre-war production levels could take more than two years.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi called the blockade an "act of war" and a direct violation of the ceasefire. Tehran’s position is fixed: it will not negotiate while the blockade remains in place.

The blockade is the right instrument of pressure. But Iran’s hardliners are using it as the publicly stated reason to refuse talks. Iran’s civilian leadership wants relief. The IRGC does not. Lifting the blockade rewards the IRGC without a concession. Keeping it gives the hardliners their ready-made pretext. An open-ended extension with no deadline does nothing to resolve that trap.

What Washington Cannot Afford to Miss

Trump’s own advisors warned him privately that extending without a deadline removes the pressure that brought Iran to the table. Iran has used every diplomatic pause in its modern history to stall, preserve leverage and avoid binding commitments. This extension is not different in kind — only in duration.

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The IRGC’s anniversary message was not accidental. Sixteen missile and drone strikes have hit Iraqi Kurdistan since the ceasefire began. A Khorramshahr-4 ballistic missile rolled through Tehran’s streets on Tuesday night. Gulf neighbors are now on notice that their oil infrastructure is a target if they align with Washington. These are not the actions of a regime preparing to concede. They are the actions of a regime that reads the open-ended extension as its next strategic advantage.

A deal signed by Iran’s civilian leaders that the IRGC will not honor is not a deal. It is a ceasefire on paper and a conflict in practice. Washington has seen that outcome before. The question is whether it is prepared to demand better.

The Bottom Line

President Donald Trump made the decision to act, and that decision imposed genuine costs on Iran. The U.S. military executed with distinction across Operation Epic Fury.

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But the measure of this conflict will not be the strikes we conducted. It will be whether Washington secures a verifiable, durable settlement — or accepts ambiguous language that the IRGC will discard the moment it calculates the price is acceptable.

The ceasefire has been extended. Iran’s hardliners have answered with seized ships, missile rallies and threats to the Gulf. The question now is not whether the United States has leverage. It plainly does. The question is whether Washington is willing to use it before the open-ended clock runs out.

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Four lessons why the 'Boom Belt' is making such a big noise with migration

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:00:20 -0400

If you want to understand where America’s economy is heading, stop watching Washington and start watching a map of the United States.

Because the biggest economic story in the country right now isn’t politics.

It’s migration. Like birds. Migrating south.

People and, more importantly, money are pouring into what’s now being called the "Boom Belt" including states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Arizona.

TEXAS EMERGES AS THE TOP DESTINATION FOR COMPANIES LEAVING BLUE STATES

Meanwhile, high-tax blue strongholds like California, New York and Illinois are watching an uncomfortable trend unfold. Their taxpayers are leaving and taking their wealth with them.

The great wealth migration

Let’s talk numbers because this isn’t anecdotal.

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Florida has gained hundreds of billions in net income migration over the past decade.
Texas consistently ranks No. 1 in net domestic migration.
California has lost more than 500,000 residents in recent years.

And here’s the kicker. The people leaving aren’t broke.

They’re high-income earners, business owners and retirees with assets.

That means when they go, they don’t just change zip codes.

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They change tax bases.

Lesson No. 1: Taxes still matter (a lot to Americans)

This may be politically inconvenient but it’s economically obvious.

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION RESET IS LIFTING WAGES AND FORCING REAL ECONOMIC REFORM

No state income tax in Florida, Tennessee and Texas
Top state tax rates above 10% in California and New York

If you’re making $1 million a year, that could be as much as a $100,000+ annual difference.

That’s not a rounding error. That’s a second house, a business investment or a reason to move.

Blue states often argue taxes fund services. Fair. But here’s the problem. If your best taxpayers leave, the math breaks. It’s like having a company and losing your best employees year over year.

Lesson No. 2: Cost of living is the silent killer

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It’s not just taxes. It’s everything.

Housing costs in California are often two-to-three times higher than Boom Belt states.
Energy, insurance and regulation stack up.

Meanwhile, cities in North Carolina or Tennessee offer:

Lower home prices.
Lower business costs.
Faster permitting.

Translation: You can build wealth faster.

And in a country obsessed with upward mobility, that matters more than ideology.

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Lesson No. 3: Business goes where it’s treated best

Follow the headquarters.

Major companies have relocated or expanded in Texas and Florida.
Manufacturing and logistics are booming across the Southeast.

Why?

Lower taxes.
Fewer regulatory hurdles.
Predictable policy environments.

Blue states often counter with innovation hubs and talent pools and they’re not wrong. But we are having a fundamental shift in America. Talent is now mobile.

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Remote work didn’t just change where you work. It changed where companies can hire and where employees choose to live.

Lesson No. 4: Lifestyle is now an economic driver

This one gets overlooked but it’s huge.

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People aren’t just moving for money.

They’re moving for all of these.

More space.
Better weather.
Perceived increased quality of life.

States like Florida and Arizona are selling something powerful. A better daily experience at a lower cost. And you know what? People are buying it like hotcakes.

TAX AND RUN: HOW NY AND CALIFORNIA ARE BLEEDING PEOPLE AND PROSPERITY

That’s hard to compete with no matter how strong your economy is on paper.

The controversial truth blue states don’t want to hear

Here’s the part that will spark debate.

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Blue states don’t have a growth problem.

They have a retention problem. Retention is everything.

They produce wealth but they don’t keep it.

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And the Boom Belt?

It doesn’t always create the wealth. It captures it by recruiting good people from blue states and coverting them to red states.

This is about red vs. blue. It is about incentives vs. outcomes.

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The Boom Belt is winning because it’s built around creating good business ideas. Here’s the general business concept. Make it easier to earn, keep and grow money.

Seems simple blue state leaders, doesn’t it?

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Until blue states figure out how to balance their ambitions with that reality, the migration won’t slow down when we live in free market enterprise.

And neither will the shift in economic power. Because in America, people don’t just vote at the ballot box. They vote with their feet and their balance sheets. Every election turns out the same. It’s the economy, stupid.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM TED JENKIN

I led peaceful pro-lifers the Biden ‘Justice’ Dept hunted. We now know how far they went

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:00:19 -0400

I founded and built the largest grassroots movement in the history of the pro-life cause: 40 Days for Life. During its first decade, I mobilized more than 2,000 leaders and 750,000 volunteers in peaceful prayer outside abortion facilities across all 50 states and dozens of other countries. These, and others like them, are exactly the people the Biden Justice Department decided to hunt and criminalize.

In early April, President Donald Trump DOJ's Weaponization Working Group released an explosive 882-page report built on more than 700,000 internal records. It confirms what pro-life Americans suspected all along: The Justice Department of the United States worked hand-in-hand with the National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and the Feminist Majority Foundation to spy on, build secret files against and prosecute peaceful pro-life citizens.

Here is the stark reality the report lays out. When pro-life Americans were charged under the law, the Biden DOJ asked judges to send them to prison for more than twice as long as the people who firebombed and vandalized pregnancy centers and churches. Fifteen pro-lifers were prosecuted for every pro-abortion offender. A grandmother praying her rosary on a sidewalk was treated as more dangerous to the country than an arsonist throwing a firebomb through the window of a pregnancy center.

In May 2022, the Supreme Court's draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked to the public. A group calling itself Jane's Revenge promised a "summer of rage" if Roe fell. The left delivered. Ninety-six pregnancy resource centers and 393 Catholic churches were firebombed, vandalized or threatened.

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Statues of Our Lady were beheaded. Doors were set on fire during Mass. "If abortions aren't safe, then neither are you" was painted on the walls of nonprofits staffed by volunteer women offering free ultrasounds, diapers and support to pregnant neighbors. The Department of Justice had been warned yet did nothing.

The same department sent a SWAT team into 40 Days for Life volunteer Mark Houck's home at dawn, assault weapons drawn, in front of his wife and seven children. Thanks to the legal work of the Thomas More Society, a jury acquitted him. The judge overseeing the case said the law was being "stretched a little thin." It had been stretched past the breaking point, and the DOJ knew it.

The new report reveals a task force inside the Civil Rights Division, led by Sanjay Patel, that built secret files on pro-life advocates who had not been charged with anything at all. Some of those files contained photographs of the targets' children. Patel and at least three other prosecutors who ran the program were properly fired. Trump pardoned many of those wrongly convicted on his second day in office. The repair work has begun but is not finished.

I have spent my adult life working with these people. I have stood with Christians praying outside abortion centers in the rain. I have worked with pregnancy center directors whose staff were sleeping in shifts to guard their doors. I have prayed with pastors whose sanctuaries were defaced. The fear in that season was real, and the aggression from Washington made it worse.

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As grateful as we are for this revelation, we also understand that stopping the prosecutions does not finish the work. The Biden DOJ did not create the contempt for praying Christians and pregnancy centers inside our federal government. It revealed how widespread that contempt already is inside the institutions that train our lawyers, our reporters, our doctors and our federal prosecutors. A new administration can halt the abuse. It cannot, by itself, change the attitudes inside the law schools and newsrooms that produced a willing accomplice like Sanjay Patel in the first place.

We should never forget this dark chapter in our nation's history. It was a season when people of faith and pro-life Americans had good reason to fear for their livelihoods, their reputations, their freedom and, in some cases, their very lives. Congress should investigate the coordination between federal prosecutors and pro-abortion advocacy groups and pass the reforms needed to prevent this from ever happening again.

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The FACE Act itself deserves a serious review. The pro-life Americans dragged through courtrooms and jail cells deserve to have their records cleared and their reputations fully restored. A long-overdue reckoning is owed to every official who wielded the Justice Department as a bludgeon against Americans whose only offense was defending human life.

The people who stood peacefully on those sidewalks never gave up on America, even when their government temporarily turned against them. We should not give up on the work of renewing our nation that was founded on the right to life.

MORNING GLORY: End the filibuster, pack the Court, kiss the Constitution goodbye

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:00:15 -0400

The Democratic Party wants to break the United States Senate’s legislative filibuster in order to pack the Supreme Court with jurisprudential clones of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has quickly emerged as the most radical of the nine justices. (Justice Jackson is also the most loquacious, as Mollie Hemingway points out in her new bestseller, "Alito: The Justice Who Reshaped the Supreme Court and Restored the Constitution." Justice Jackson uttered 78,215 words from the bench in a recent term. Justices Gorsuch and Kagan got the silver and bronze in the spoken-word competition, but it wasn’t close, as they were both around 50,000 words apiece.)

President Joe Biden supported expanding the court to 14 members in April 2021. Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey is one of many senators who have also applauded the number 14. That’s no surprise, as adding five radicals to Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor would lock in an eight-vote bloc of justices who, after that revolution, would simply be legislators in robes. Kiss the Constitution goodbye if and when "the Nine" becomes "the Fourteen." Hard-left progressivism, whatever the flavor of that day may be, will be in the saddle.

The Fifth and 14th Amendments to the Constitution guarantee every American "due process of law." Do those guarantees stand between a left-wing Congress and a left-wing president bent on torching the Constitution?

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It is hard to deny that all precedents would be out the door with a radicalized court packed with progressive activist law professors. The precedents might end up out the door with a nine-justice court if Democrats win enough elections, as Father Time remains undefeated when it comes to the current membership of the court. That would not be a radical change, but rather a process the public could see and intervene in via elections. There is no denying that the Supreme Court vacancy at the time of the 2016 election helped power President Donald Trump’s stunning upset win that year. More than a few voters that year were motivated by the fear of a court dominated by nominees of prospective President Hillary Clinton.

Democrats are quick to point out that the Constitution is silent on the exact number of justices and that, in fact, Congress often tweaked the number of justices between 1789 and the Judiciary Act of 1869, which fixed the number of justices at nine, a number that has not changed since.

That 1869 act followed fast on the heels of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 and which joined its guarantee of "due process of law" to that same guarantee in the Fifth Amendment. The 14th Amendment’s ratification in 1868 and the court’s right-sizing, which followed the next year, suggests a consensus at the time of the amendment, one that has never been changed since. (The court has also never had more than 10 justices, and that just briefly.) The Biden-Markey proposal is many things, but it is not rooted in American history, and it certainly would destroy "due process of law" in the nation.

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Court-packing would, in fact, mark the actual end of the rule of law, and the manipulation of the court would follow every future political upheaval in which both houses of Congress and the president controlled the federal legislative process. That’s just what happens when suddenly a major break with tradition and practice occurs. The other side of the aisle adopts the tactic too.

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid broke the Senate’s filibuster rules via the "nuclear option" in order to confirm judges to the D.C. Circuit in 2013 over the objection and warning of then-Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. Soon the Senate’s majority switched from Democrats to Republicans, and McConnell made good on his warning by using simple majorities to confirm three nominees to the Supreme Court put forward by President Trump. Bad move, Harry, but not one that out-and-out destroyed the institution of the court.

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Packing the Supreme Court via simple-majority votes — or even by supermajority — would be a disaster, the sort of convulsion that marked the end days of the Roman Republic, when political maneuvering and continual breaches of fundamental traditions occurred and relations between the two parties so soured more than 2,000 years ago that civil wars were triggered and eventually dictatorship was the only answer. Republics built on the rule of law are not the norm. They are history’s exceptions. We have one. We should work hard to keep it intact.

There is an excellent argument that court-packing is actually rule-of-law-busting and thus violates the Fifth and 14th Amendments’ guarantees of due process of law. But who would be able to make that argument? Who would have standing to bring the challenge to proposed court-packing legislation, and when would such a challenge be ripe? These are difficult hurdles for any litigant bringing any case. A litigant must show actual injury — a "concrete and particularized" injury, one traceable to defendants’ conduct and an injury that the court could actually redress.

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Certainly no challenge would lie from anyone in the immediate aftermath of the filibuster being broken, but how about the moment after the court-packing legislation was signed? Who could ask the court if the destruction of the rule of law was OK by the Nine before their number soared to Fourteen?

Perhaps professors Randy Barnett and Josh Blackman, co-authors of the best constitutional law casebook out there right now. All of their decades-long work on that terrific casebook would be destroyed immediately, as a 14-member court would make kindling out of all prior decisions (and all the casebooks that explain them) and do so in rather quick fashion.

Perhaps one of the nine justices could bring the case? Their individual authority would be diluted by the expansion to 14 — but would any of them want to be the justice arguing to keep their power intact?

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Time for the people serious about preserving the rule of law to begin thinking through how to protect due process of law in this country come 2029, if a Democratic president and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate do what they will almost certainly pledge to do on the campaign trail: end the filibuster and pack the court.

And it is also time for the Senate Republican caucus to bravely and fearlessly defend the legislative filibuster as it currently exists. The legislative filibuster is the biggest hurdle in the way of would-be court-wreckers, the early-warning system that danger to the rule of law is drawing close.

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The GOP should be the party of the Constitution and the rule of law, and it ought to be out front right now defending the court’s membership at nine and the filibuster generally. Win the argument about the filibuster, and you will never have to win the case against court-packing or even worry about "standing" and "ripeness."

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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What Virginia’s redistricting vote really means for Democrats and Republicans

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:26:50 -0400

Virginia Democrats got their number last night. But what they got was not a mandate, it was a margin. A razor-thin, 3-point squeaker that cost them $64 million in dark money to pull off, in a state where the governor won by 15 points just one year ago. If this is what victory looks like for Democrats, Republicans should be encouraged.

Let's be honest about what happened on April 21. Voters across Virginia were asked to ratify an amendment that a sitting circuit court judge had already declared void, not once, but twice, calling it a "blatant abuse of power." They were sold the word "fairness" on the ballot while Democrats designed a map that hands them 10 of Virginia's 11 congressional districts. They were told this was about the people's voice, funded by $93 million in largely anonymous cash, with $40 million flowing from House Democrat leadership's own political operation. If they were doing the right thing, they wouldn't have had to buy the election.

And the people of Virginia, particularly in rural communities, saw through it. Early voting was up across 70+ rural Republican localities. Lee County, Scott County, Alleghany County, communities that rarely make national headlines, turned out in force to say no to a gerrymander designed in a backroom by the same Richmond politicians who raised taxes and cultivated failing schools. That energy is real, it's not going away, and we are going to need it in November.

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But Democrats’ celebrations of the vote might be premature. The vote is not the final word.

The Virginia Supreme Court has already told both sides exactly what comes next. Before allowing the referendum to proceed, the justices wrote that "if the electorate approves the proposed amendment, we then must exercise our constitutional duty to review lower courts' declaratory judgments... and address de novo what equitable remedies, if any, are appropriate." In plain English: the court reserved the right to strike this map down, and it set a briefing deadline for tomorrow, April 23. The legal fight is not over.

The constitutional defects here are not minor. Democrats jammed this amendment through a special session that was called exclusively to address the state budget, then expanded it to rewrite the rules of congressional representation. They skipped the required 90-day public notice. And they passed the amendment while over one million Virginians were already casting ballots in the 2025 general election, a direct violation of Virginia's constitutional requirement that amendments pass before an election takes place. A judge found all three violations. The Supreme Court of Virginia must now decide whether it will enforce its own constitution or stand down because Democrats ran a successful, and expensive, public pressure campaign.

Now, we have to trust the court to do its job.

And if the court does its job, Republicans must be ready to fight the next battle. The RNC, the NRCC and Congressmen Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith filed suit because the process was corrupt from the start, not because Republicans are afraid of competition. We are not afraid of competition. We are afraid of a system where constitutional guardrails are demolished whenever the other side decides they're inconvenient. Today it's Virginia. Tomorrow it's your state.

This is the broader war Democrats have declared. When President Donald Trump and Republican governors used the legal redistricting process to draw competitive maps in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina, Democrats screamed about gerrymandering. Then they turned around and drew a map in Virginia that is, by any objective measure, the most aggressively gerrymandered congressional map in the country. It splits Prince William County across five separate congressional districts as well as Fairfax County into five separate congressional districts.

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Republican women across this country need to understand what is at stake. If this map stands, Democrats could pick up four House seats in Virginia alone, potentially enough to flip the majority and end the legislative agenda that is delivering for American families.

So here is my message to Republican women in Virginia and across the country: last night was a setback, not a surrender. The courts must consider the referendum’s wobbly constitutionality. Our lawyers are still fighting. Our voters showed up in record numbers in places no one expected. And when the Virginia Supreme Court issues its ruling, potentially within weeks, we need to be ready to mobilize, organize and amplify whatever comes next.

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They spent $64 million to win by 3 points in a friendly state. We need to spend our energy making sure that investment never pays off.

Fight on.

DR MARC SIEGEL: What Dr Oz says about Trump’s diet may surprise his harshest critics

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:00:53 -0400

I have known cardiologist Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, for many years. I’ve interviewed him multiple times on my show, "Doctor Radio Reports" on SiriusXM, and have also spent time around the dinner table with him and his family.

Many in the cardiac and cardiac surgery fields in New York have told me that he is one of the best heart surgeons in history. I have always found him to be highly analytical and to possess a good sense of humor.

Dr. Oz spends a lot of time with President Donald Trump these days as they travel to and attend events together. He told me recently on my show that he is struck by how clever and funny the president is and how he doesn’t actually have a bad diet.

Here are five things that struck me about the president’s diet following our recent conversation.

On Diet Coke

Last week, the news media excoriated President Trump for supposedly saying that Diet Coke kills cancer cells. It is no secret that the president drinks a lot of diet soda, but it is less well known what he thinks about its properties.

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Here’s what Dr. Oz said to me in an interview for my show, "Doctor Radio Reports," on SiriusXM. "We sometimes travel together, and so I was joking with his son about something his son knows very well, which is that his father is very clever. He will deal with your chastising him or disagreeing with him in a humorous way. I was giving him a little bit of grief for drinking diet soda, and he said, ‘What are you talking about? This stuff will kill grass. That’s why I think it probably kills cancer cells.’ It was a joke. Obviously, no one is going to argue that diet soda has that impact. It’s humorous that people don’t have a sense of humor. Nothing about that comment is dangerous or harmful. I think most folks took it in the right spirit."

On Trump’s Sense of Humor

Clearly, not everyone took the president’s "kills grass" comment in the right spirit, and many in the news media used it as yet another platform to attack Trump. But Dr. Oz’s comment to me — that it’s humorous that people don’t have a sense of humor — is also noteworthy, because humor is good for your health, even if diet soda isn’t (I don’t think it can kill grass, but it definitely isn’t healthy).

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Humor, on the other hand, is very healthy because it decreases stress and stress hormones (epinephrine and norepinephrine), which strain the heart, and can improve mood. Humor also releases feel-good hormones, including oxytocin, which improves bonding and lowers blood pressure. https://mcpress.mayoclinic.org/healthy-aging/the-health-benefits-of-humor/

On Trump’s Cognitive Ability

Dr. Oz told me he is impressed with the president’s focus on the job at hand and his drive to accomplish things. Oz said, "The president is remarkably strong in his ability to get things done. He calls at all hours, he’s focused on this job. It’s wanting to do this job well that keeps him so energized."

In fact, highly skilled, cognitively demanding jobs with high decision-making authority are associated with a lower risk of dementia. The president often comments about how well he performs on repeated cognitive tests, and he appears articulate and engaged, which doesn’t keep the media from speculating excessively.

On Trump’s Diet and Fast Food

Dr. Oz made the point that President Trump’s diet is much better than people may think while he’s at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, but that on the road — and, of course, he travels frequently — he has fewer options, so he turns to fast food because he knows it has to meet a certain standard and will be well-prepared.

Dr. Oz said to me during the interview, "Sometimes he eats junky food. He says this to me, and others have heard this as well, [that] when he’s on the road his main goal is to not get sick from a meal that’s not well-prepared. Going to the larger chain fast-food joints allows him to buy food that’s very standardized, very safe, and allows him to keep going at full speed. When he eats on his own, back at Mar-a-Lago or the White House, he eats plenty of healthy foods that he has access to and that he generally consumes. I don’t think it’s fair to say that he has a ‘bad diet.’ But he’s on the road a lot, and sometimes when you are on the road you can’t pick the meals you want to have — you have to eat what you can get."

There is some truth to what Dr. Oz is saying here. Overall, foodborne illness is more prevalent in restaurants than in fast-food chains. And a study released in 2017 by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania found that chain restaurants committed an average of around six violations per inspection, compared to an average of nine for non-chain locations.

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Of course, this approach ignores the MAHA movement’s focus on ultra-processed foods as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and certain kinds of cancer.

On Trump’s Exercise and Sleep

Dr. Oz didn’t get into this directly during our interview on SiriusXM, but "calling at all hours" likely means the president is not getting enough sleep. Less than seven hours of sleep per night has been linked to poorer health, and it is unlikely that the president sleeps nearly that much. And though he is a great golfer, and golf is an excellent form of relaxation and exercise, he could probably get even more of his necessary exercise if he played without the golf cart.

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On the other hand, President Trump’s blood pressure has repeatedly been shown to be normal, and his cholesterol is well managed with medication.

According to his physicians, his physicals have all been completely normal, which is especially impressive for a 79-year-old. While some might not wish the president well, Dr. Oz’s insights paint a reassuring picture. But please, go easy on the aspirin, Mr. President.

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Why the Middle East agrees with President Trump more than America realizes

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:00:48 -0400

Americans are debating whether this war was worth it. Thirteen soldiers have come home in caskets. Hundreds more carry wounds. No one takes that lightly. Least of all someone like me — who chose this country and wears its flag by choice, not by birth.

I was born on the Iranian border and raised in the shadow of its wars. I have seen firsthand what these policies do to the people of this region. I still travel across the Middle East — I was in Erbil, Riyadh and Dubai just recently. I know what people say when the cameras are off. It is not anger at America. It is relief.

But here is what the critics are missing. For millions of people across the Middle East, this war did not start on Feb. 28. It started decades ago. What changed is that a president decided to stop managing the problem and start confronting it. The people of the region noticed. I promise you — they noticed.

What most Americans never hear is what those people actually want. Not war. Not jihad. Not martyrdom. Across the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, 140 million people are under the age of 30. They want what any young American wants: a job, a stable country and a future that is not hostage to someone else’s ideology. New leaders in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kurdistan and Syria are building toward exactly that. When I sit with young professionals in Erbil or Riyadh or Dubai, they talk about startups. They talk about AI. They talk about opportunity.

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And this is not theory. Look at what happens when stability takes root. The UAE was empty desert 50 years ago. Today it is a global center of commerce where millions of people — including Americans — live, invest and build. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq, encircled by hostile forces, built one of the most open societies in the Middle East. It became the largest safe haven for persecuted Christians in the region. And despite a severe economic embargo by Iran-backed forces, Kurdistan built a stable, multibillion-dollar economy that houses nearly all U.S. forces in Iraq. People move there because it works. These places are not exceptions. They are previews of what the entire region can become.

What stops it, every time, is the same force. Iran-backed armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen — all taking orders from Tehran, all blocking the future the rest of the region is trying to build. For 45 years, one capital has exported instability to every corner of this region — not because Iranians want it, but because a small circle of men in power profit from it.

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The numbers tell the story. Since Feb. 28, Iran has struck every country in the region that chose partnership with the West — and not one of them fired a shot at Iran. The UAE has absorbed more than 2,800 missiles and drones. Thirteen people were killed. Over 200 were wounded. Kurdistan has been hit more than 700 times. Fourteen dead — including a husband and wife killed at midnight, two daughters left behind. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar — all struck. None of them threatened Iran. Their only offense is that they chose a different future.

These forces have not only been destroying the Middle East. They have been killing Americans for decades.

Every president before this one chose to look away. They minimized the threat. They told Americans it was under control. They left it for the next generation. But ignoring the Middle East always comes with a price. Barack Obama pulled back from Iraq. ISIS filled the vacuum. His nuclear deal sent billions to Tehran and its proxy terror groups in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Joe Biden called it strategic patience. That patience gave us Oct. 7. The problem never went away. It always got worse. This president made a different choice.

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I grew up in this. I did not study it in a seminar. I know what a missile sounds like when it hits a neighborhood school. I know what families look like when they pack a car at 3 in the morning and drive toward the one city that is still standing. The fear across this region is not that America acted. It is that the world will lose interest before anything changes.

The Middle East is not a burden. It is a region of extraordinary talent, ambition and wealth held back by a violent few who have never been weaker than they are right now.

The people of this region have been asking the world to listen for decades. Perhaps now, it will.

EARTH DAY: Three big signs the climate movement is running out of gas

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:00:44 -0400

Former White House chief of staff (and potential 2028 presidential hopeful) Rahm Emanuel is associated with the phrase: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." His point was parlaying voters’ short-term anxiety into long-term political gain.

Yet with a gallon of gasoline averaging more than $4 in early April, the normal deafening chorus from the environmental movement has fallen to a dull murmur – even in the lead-up to Earth Day, their holiest of high holidays. With the world gripped by an energy crisis, the relative quiet from climate groups is an acknowledgment that their beliefs are no solution.

Consider California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Last July, he declared that his state’s, "economic growth comes not in spite of clean energy but because of it." Now, he is including his administration’s role to "responsibly increase oil production" in a press release.

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Here are three examples of shifting climate politics, and their implications for the future.

EV Demand Remains Low

During the Biden administration, the push to force consumers into electric vehicles was everywhere. At the federal level, $7,500 tax credits were handed out. California implemented mandates requiring 100% of new cars and light trucks sold qualify as "zero-emission" by 2035.

In June 2022, as gas prices soared, then-Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat, announced "it didn’t matter how high" gas cost because she drove an EV.

How times (and the numbers) have changed. In 2024, the Big Three automakers in Stabenow’s home state lost a combined $52 billion on EVs – higher than their entire combined net profits.

Remember when then-President Joe Biden traveled to Michigan for a photo op with Ford’s new F-150 Lightning all electric truck? Facing flagging demand, Ford ceased production of the Lightning last year, noting, "the American consumer is speaking clearly."

Indeed, they are. A recent Wall Street Journal story described "mostly empty and losing money" EV production plants throughout the Rust Belt as part of "America’s messy breakup with electric vehicles." Even if consumer interest in EVs ticks upward as some analysts expect, the reaction from the politicians is the true tell.

Communist Cuba Bailed Out By Russian Oil

The conflict in Iran has overshadowed the sad plight of the people of Cuba. Amid more than six decades of misery under a communist regime, the lights have literally gone out since January’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. Cut off from the cheap oil from their socialist sympathizing neighbor, Cuba has plunged into a humanitarian crisis. The New York Times documented patients suffering or dying in hospitals without power, and ambulances parked because drivers can’t find gas.

Cuba relies on oil and gas for more than 90% of its electricity, compared to just 2% from renewables. The situation got so dire that President Donald Trump – often maligned by his critics for so-called lack of empathy – allowed a Russian oil tanker to reach Havana, noting, "they have to survive."

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Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are precious few environmentalists when basic humanitarian necessities are lacking.

American Energy Dominance Has Softened The Blow

While current elevated gas prices are painful, countries more energy dependent than the United States feel the squeeze. In March, the Philippines shifted to four-day workweeks. Slovenia became the first European Union country to ration fuel. Thousands of gas stations across Australia, which import 90% of its fuel from the Middle East, ran out of fuel.

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It’s a different story here at home, where U.S. crude oil imports from the Persian Gulf have fallen to the lowest level in 40 years amid increasing domestic production.

Meanwhile, prices in the U.S. for natural gas, responsible for nearly half (43%) of our nation’s electricity, have remained relatively flat, while spiking roughly 70% in Europe and Asia.

President Trump deserves great credit for his renewed focus on American energy dominance.

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This Earth Day, the climate movement will once again make their chicken little cries, but the uproar is a far cry from recent years past. There are far fewer hyperbolic claims that "the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change," as U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared in 2019.

International affairs lay bare the inextricable link between energy and national security, a lesson most reasonable Americans inherently understand. The climate movement knows that even in this critical moment, their brand of politics has been defeated by common sense.

Trump’s Operation Epic Fury humiliated the experts and redrew the Middle East

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:00:42 -0400

When Operation Epic Fury began almost two months ago, Washington’s class of self-proclaimed foreign policy experts began warning that it would lead to several unintended and alarmingly negative secondary consequences.

The general consensus seemed to be that, from President Donald Trump on down, the administration was not doing the long-term planning to prevent these bad outcomes, notably countries in the region shifting away from the U.S. to China, a broadening war led by Iran’s proxies and devastating spikes in energy prices. Even more shockingly, according to these experts, the president had not consulted with NATO allies before the action, depriving America of their critical support.

While Epic Fury is certainly not over and outcomes remain uncertain, we now have enough perspective to determine whether these dire prognostications have come to pass. The experts’ scorecard to date is not good.

First and foremost, China has not been anywhere near the conflict, either in terms of projecting power into the region to protect its own vital energy imports from the Gulf or in terms of bolstering its regional influence. On the contrary, angered by Iran’s ill-advised attacks on its neighbors, America’s partners in the Middle East have drawn closer together — and moved toward the U.S., not to mention Israel. The PRC has already lost Venezuela as a petro-vassal nation this year; now it faces the loss of Iran as well.

LIZ PEEK: TRUMP IS PUTTING AMERICA FIRST BY BACKING IRAN INTO A CORNER

The much-vaunted "ring of fire" around Israel, coordinated by Iran’s terrorist proxies such as the Houthis, Hamas, the Shiite militias in Iraq and Hezbollah, has failed to materialize. The first three parties have been largely quiet to date, and the Jewish state has gone on the offensive against Hezbollah while engaging in historic diplomacy with Lebanon to come to a ceasefire, with the prospects of a normalization deal on the horizon. Iran and its proxies are very much on the outside looking in on this process, which makes them ever more irrelevant.

And then there are energy prices. While Iran’s threats to constrict global energy supplies through its claimed control of the Strait of Hormuz have caused prices to rise, predictions of $200-a-barrel oil have not been realized. Certainly, prices for products such as gasoline and jet fuel are uncomfortably high, but so far, an overall energy crisis has been averted.

One reason has been the successful regional pivot to pipelines bypassing the strait, notably by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Another is burgeoning U.S. production of oil and natural gas, both of which hit record highs during Epic Fury.

While this increased production has not entirely offset the restriction of exports from the Gulf, it has absorbed some of the shock to the U.S. economy that this would have caused historically. In particular, American production of natural gas has acted as a critical buffer as prices have remained stable while supply was restricted and prices soared in Europe and Asia.

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Finally, the withholding of support from what Donald Rumsfeld would have called "old Europe" has not been material — primarily because it has been revealed that those countries do not have much to provide. After the original fit of pique with which Brussels, Paris, London and Madrid greeted Epic Fury, they have resorted to strongly worded statements and performative Zoom calls to demonstrate their solidarity, followed by pledges to secure Hormuz, on which they are highly dependent, after the real fighting has concluded. Their impotence is embarrassing, but at least it has been exposed, which can lead to the difficult but necessary discussions about the commitment of Europe’s largest economies to their own defense.

In better news, European members of NATO have not proven monolithic. "New Europe" countries such as the Baltics and Scandinavian countries, as well as Poland and Romania, have been supportive of the United States, possibly because they understand that while The New York Times was technically mistaken when it referred to the alliance as the "North American Treaty Organization," it was substantively correct that without America, NATO would not exist. Those countries seem much more concerned about protecting their security and economic ties with the U.S. than with posturing about capabilities that no longer endure.

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As President Trump offers the Iranian regime a diplomatic ultimatum to accept an end to its nuclear program and to remove its highly enriched uranium or face military escalation, the situation remains fluid and tense, but the fact remains that many of the dire predictions experts made at the beginning of the war have not come to pass.

It remains to be seen how many other cherished assumptions will be shattered in the aftermath of Epic Fury, but one thing seems certain: President Trump has fundamentally reshaped the Middle East — and its future. Experts should take note.

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The truth behind the gender wage gap myth isn’t what you’ve been told

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:00:09 -0400

Certain myths in the public sphere persist, no matter how many times they have been debunked. One of the most enduring in modern life is the myth of the so-called wage gap.

Recent "sky is falling" headlines warn, "Gender pay gap widens to 81 cents: Difference between men and women increases for second year in a row."

Sound the alarm!

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The truth is, we women are doing just fine, thank you very much.

Better than fine, in fact. By most measures, it’s our boys and men who are struggling.

Boys receive two-thirds of the "D"s and "F"s in our schools, but less than 40% of the "A"s. The oft-cited female gap in math and science is 3 points, while the male gap in literacy is 10 points. According to the (liberal) Brookings Institution, "Girls outperform boys in reading by 40% of a grade level in every state." On our recent national writing exam, only 18% of eighth-grade boys were considered proficient writers.

According to the Pew Research Center, 44% of college students ages 18-24 are men, and that percentage is dropping. Women now constitute the majority of students in grad school (58%), law school (56%), and med school (55%).

Boys are lagging behind girls in most developmental, behavioral, academic, and social markers in all industrialized countries. A 2015 report from the World Health Organization concluded, "In most of the world, girls and women are doing better than boys and men in both physical and mental health indicators."

But this is about the wage gap. What happens when women join the workforce?

To the extent that the gap exists, it can be largely attributed to deliberate and meaningful choices made by women in the workforce that prioritize home and family over career: less willingness to relocate, less willingness to work more than 40 hours/week, preference for less demanding jobs that will enable them to spend time with their family when they come home at the end of the work day.

Broad wage gap statistics are often misleading because they fail to account for these preferences. When these variables are considered, the supposed gender pay gap narrows substantially. Research by the American Association of University Women finds that the gap shrinks to just a few cents on the dollar. A U.S. Department of Labor review of dozens of peer‑reviewed studies reached a similar conclusion, finding that most of the commonly cited wage disparity can be explained by choices made by individual workers.

Much of the debate over wages and gender overlooks a basic but uncomfortable reality: men and women often make different choices long before they ever receive a paycheck. Those differences appear as early as college, where students cluster into fields with vastly different earning potential. Men are disproportionately represented in higher‑paying majors like engineering, computer science and certain sciences, while women dominate lower‑paying fields such as education, counseling and social work. Even within the same profession, earnings often diverge based on specialization, hours worked and willingness to relocate. These are not mysterious forces or hidden acts of discrimination; they are the predictable consequences of individual preferences and life priorities.

That observation becomes even more apparent when work is weighed against family life. A young woman I know recently turned down a very prestigious role in the administration to be home with her baby. Her story is not at all uncommon. Many young women don’t want to be "Boss Babes," they would rather nurse their babes. Some would prefer to leave the workforce completely for a time. Statistically, women still want to be wives and mothers, but policy choices made over the last half century have made it increasingly difficult to support and sustain a family on a single income. Thankfully, women are offered more choices and opportunities today than ever before in history. Remote work, job-sharing, part-time opportunities, entrepreneurial endeavors give much desired flexibility. Big corporations offering abortion benefits but not flexibility have rightly earned their disdain.

So, if they must or want to work, they often choose to pass up prestigious or demanding career opportunities to spend time with their children while they are young. There are those on the left who will say this in itself is proof of internalized sexism, but despite the left’s best efforts at social engineering, basic human nature and biology will not be denied. Children do best when raised by two parents, a mother and a father, but when they are little, babies need their mamas.

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British politician Ernest Benn once said that politics is "the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." Few debates illustrate that better than the modern fixation on the wage gap.

When advocates insist that the solution lies in "strengthening childcare and reproductive health supports" while pushing more women into full‑time work, what they are really proposing is not fairness, but compliance. Another attempt to override personal choices in the name of progress, prioritizing workforce participation over families, and children raised by institutions rather than by loving parents in a nurturing environment.

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But here’s the thing about a job. Work is transactional. A job does not care if you fall ill. It won’t sit beside you and hold your hand in the hospital. It won’t grieve for you when you are gone. Families do. Yet modern political discussions about pay disparities often diagnose the wrong problem and prescribe the wrong remedies, framing every difference in outcome as evidence of injustice.

Until our policy conversations acknowledge that truth, we will continue to mistake differences in outcome for injustice and sacrifice the things that matter most while congratulating ourselves for doing so.

America must choose between faith, order and a culture of lawlessness

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:00:09 -0400

There are two very different messages that are battling for the soul of our nation right now. One message lifts us up. The other message drags us down. The question of which message succeeds depends on whether we have the strength to repair the torn fabric of our society or whether we have weakened to the point where we are content to watch it unravel even further.

The first message came from NASA astronaut Victor Glover, the mission specialist on Artemis II. When this accomplished American hero returned home, still in his flight suit, he was greeted by his entire neighborhood. He stood before them and spoke words straight from Scripture: "Let’s be this more. Let’s be neighbors. God told us to love Him with all that we are and love our neighbors as ourselves."

That is the message America desperately needs. It is humble. It is biblical. It is unifying. It calls every one of us, regardless of race, background, or neighborhood, to the kind of neighborly love that builds strong families, safe streets, and thriving communities.

Victor Glover represents what is possible when faith, discipline, excellence, and personal responsibility come together. He is living proof that the ladders of opportunity are still there for anyone willing to climb them.

ARTEMIS II PILOT VICTOR GLOVER PRAISES GOD AFTER RETURN, SAYS MISSION WAS 'TOO BIG TO BE IN ONE BODY'

Yet sometimes the simplest and truest of all messages is the hardest to follow. Why is that?

The second message is the one playing out far too often on the streets of Chicago. Just weeks ago, 25-year-old Alexander Kazanowski, a young father expecting his second child, already raising a little girl named Thea, was brutally beaten to death outside a bar in the Avondale neighborhood. He was an entrepreneur who started his first company at 19, a wrestler, a model, a man full of vigor and promise. Now his unborn son will grow up without a father, and his family is left to grieve a life stolen in a moment of senseless violence.

Police are still searching for the suspects, four people of interest, including three men and one woman. Another innocent life gone. Another family shattered. Another reminder that evil does not care about skin color, political slogans, or excuses.

I'VE SEEN THE BODIES ON MY BLOCK — AND I KNOW WHAT REALLY STOPS THE KILLING

This is the deadly result when we choose dysfunction over discipline. When we protect violence instead of confronting it. When we make excuses for those who violate the most basic social contract: that we do not harm the innocent, that we do not destroy what others have built, that we do not turn our neighborhoods into war zones.

As a pastor who has buried too many young men on Chicago’s South Side, I say this plainly: we cannot keep tolerating or excusing the culture of lawlessness and then act shocked when it claims more victims, whether they are teens in Englewood or a young father in Avondale. Real justice is biblical justice. It protects the innocent. It punishes the guilty without apology. It demands accountability from every citizen, no matter their background.

CHICAGO'S DEADLY SANCTUARY MADNESS IS COSTING INNOCENT AMERICANS THEIR LIVES

We need a sanctuary for all, we need safe communities where fathers can walk home at night, where children can play without fear, where families can build futures instead of burying them. That sanctuary will never come from more government programs, more victimhood narratives, or more soft bigotry of low expectations. It comes only when Victor Glover’s message wins out: Love God. Love your neighbor. Speak truth. Enforce consequences. Reject excuses.

My Walk Across America showed me that most of this country still believes in Glover’s vision of faith, family, hard work, and genuine neighborly love. But in too many of our cities, a different current flows: one of instant retaliation, fatherlessness, glorification of the streets, and a refusal to call evil by its name.

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We must reverse that current. The choice is that simple and it is a hard one.

Victor Glover's son will grow up knowing his father. Alexander Kazanowski's son will not. That is the difference between these two messages. That is what is actually at stake.

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Glover said it plainly: Love God. Love your neighbor. That is not a slogan. It is the only foundation on which real sanctuary — for every race, every family, every child — has ever been built.

Choose that. Fight for that. God bless you, and God bless America.

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We flew to space for America — now we're defending democracy at home

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 09:00:51 -0400

The Artemis II astronauts who recently traveled around the moon reminded us that watching humans rocket into space creates a profoundly shared sense of connection, unity and hope. Between the two of us, we’ve flown millions of miles through space. In each of those missions, we proudly represented our country, worked together to achieve a common goal and carried a responsibility to speak up if we spotted a concern.

We are former NASA astronauts, and we swore an oath to support and defend the U.S. Constitution. We love this country, and we believe deeply in the American values that have guided our nation for nearly 250 years. On Tuesday, April 21, we launch a new patriotic mission: to protect the Constitution and the rule of law, and to elevate leaders who are committed to getting things done and preserving American democracy for the long term.

With help and support from over 100 fellow former NASA astronauts, we’ve created Astronauts for America to promote the democratic values that make self-government possible. Our members are Republicans, Democrats and Independents from every corner of the country and from all walks of life. Collectively, we bring a deep sense of duty, not ideology, to this work.

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Steve served our nation for over 30 years in the U.S. Air Force and at NASA as a pilot and astronaut. Garrett spent 95 days on the International Space Station and worked at SpaceX for more than a decade, most recently as a senior advisor and director of space operations. We both joined NASA because it represents the pinnacle of American possibility and achievement — using science, ingenuity and teamwork to explore the outer reaches of our world.

We’re not the kind of guys who do a lot of politicking. Spaceflight is about commitment to the mission and working toward a common goal. Despite all the time we’ve spent together over the years, politics never entered the conversation. Only recently did we learn that one of us is a registered Republican and one of us is a registered Democrat.

NASA CHIEF JARED ISAACMAN SAYS ARTEMIS II WOULD NOT BE POSSIBLE 'IF IT WASN'T FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP'

From space, you can clearly see that what unites us is far more important than what divides us. But over the past few decades, partisan polarization has driven a weakening of our democracy and an erosion of our constitutional norms, including respect for the rule of law and limits on government power. Too often, evidence and expertise are dismissed by those seeking to score political points. And when democratic systems fail, it sparks a domino effect: civil rights diminish, science suffers and national security is compromised.

Strengthening our democracy requires continued work and effort from all of us. As an organization, Astronauts for America aims to restore respect for the Constitution by working across our differences and prioritizing truth and integrity in leadership. We will team up with voters and support elected officials who govern with fealty to the Constitution and who, like us, prioritize data and evidence. We will elevate leaders who work across differences to get things done. And we will hold policymakers accountable when they ignore the rule of law.

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To our fellow Americans, we say: Democracy is not a spectator sport. Let’s stand against divisiveness, polarization and any attack on our American values. Let’s look this kind of evil in the face and remember our collective responsibility to defend the Constitution and the democratic values that make the U.S. the greatest country in the world. Stand up for every kid in America who shouldn’t fear violence or ostracism when they voice a dissenting opinion, and every kid who dreams of representing America in space or realizing his or her own version of the American dream.

Everyone who serves in the armed forces or straps into a rocket wonders how they’ll react when tested. Will they rise to the occasion or falter and wilt in the face of fear? We all hope and pray that we will be our best selves in that moment, and that our colleagues will have our backs.

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We are in a challenging moment now. But we have seen — up close and from space — what is possible when Americans come together to put our country first.

Garrett Reisman is a former NASA astronaut and co-chair of Astronauts for America.

REP CLAUDIA TENNEY: Why is New York punishing nuns who care for the dying?

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:00:31 -0400

For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have quietly cared for the sick, accompanying them in their final days with dignity and compassion at the Rosary Hill Home in New York. These Catholic nuns provide free hospice care to terminally ill cancer patients who have nowhere else to go. They do not take a dime from patients or taxpayers, they simply serve, guided by their faith and a commitment to charitable care for the most vulnerable among us.

Instead of supporting these dutiful servants of God, the State of New York is threatening these nuns with fines, loss of their license and even jail time for refusing to give up their faith.

Under a law signed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York state imposed new radical gender identity mandates on long-term care facilities. In practice, that means these facilities are being forced to adopt policies on room and bathroom assignments based on gender preference, not biological sex, pronoun usage and internal procedures that directly conflict with the sisters’ religious beliefs.

TOP NEW YORK HOSPITAL TO END TRANSGENDER PROGRAM FOR MINORS

State regulators have made clear this is not optional. These women must abandon their faith and surrender to the political machine of Albany or risk legal consequences. New York state would rather shut down a free care center for the terminally ill than allow religious freedom.

This is not about protecting the vulnerable. That is what the sisters already do, freely and without condition. This is about forcing compliance and obedience to the woke mob in Albany, even on those who dedicate their lives to serving others. No one is spared.

This is part of a broader pattern.

Across New York, state officials have bulldozed anyone in their way of implementing this radical agenda. Attorney General Letitia James has pressured hospitals to provide genital mutilation surgeries for minors, warning of legal consequences if they refuse. State agencies have issued guidance to schools mandating adherence to gender identity policies regardless of federal requirements. To make matters worse, Albany politicians are working to erode parents' rights by allowing schools to hide critical information from parents. New York is using its full power to go after those who refuse to fall in line.

NEW YORK'S HOCHUL DROVE ME TO FLORIDA — NOW SHE'S BEGGING ME TO RETURN. NOT HAPPENING

This is happening at a time when New York is facing serious challenges that demand real leadership and focus. New Yorkers are paying some of the highest taxes in the country, energy costs continue to rise, and families and businesses are leaving the state in record numbers in search of opportunity and affordability elsewhere.

Instead of addressing these issues, Albany is more focused on pushing gender policies to be more radical than the last. Instead of addressing rising costs of healthcare, Albany wants to shut down a free hospice clinic, all while using taxpayer dollars to give free healthcare to illegal aliens. Instead of serving New Yorkers, Albany wants to go after anyone courageous enough to speak against its radical gender identity platform.

That contrast is impossible to ignore.

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New York state is focused on shutting down a charitable institution that provides care, compassion and dignity to those at the end of their lives, while they allow New Yorkers to suffer from the consequences of their own policies.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne do not discriminate; they care for anyone who comes through their doors with compassion and respect in their final days. But in today’s New York, compassion and respect are not a priority. Neither is commonsense public policy.

This is the chilling message being sent by Kathy Hochul, not just to these sisters, but to every faith-based organization, every caregiver and every institution that does not align with Albany’s ideological agenda.

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It raises a simple question: Who is Albany standing for?

Is it standing for those who dedicate their lives to caring for the sick and dying? Is it standing for New Yorkers? Or is it standing for their ideological system that prioritizes woke mandates over compassion and ideology over service?

The answer matters.

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Because if New York is willing to threaten servants of God who provide free hospice care, then it is clear that they will stop at nothing to quash all dissent. And if this is where the state’s focus lies at a time of rising costs, failing systems, rampant crime and continued outmigration, then it is clear something is deeply wrong.

Let’s call it for what it is: An attempt to silence the faithful.

New Yorkers deserve better. They deserve leadership that focuses on the problems facing our state, supports those who serve their communities and respects the fundamental freedoms that define this country.

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The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne should be honored, not targeted.

And New York should remember that compassion cannot be mandated, and it should never be punished.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM REPRESENTATIVE CLAUDIA TENNEY

MORNING GLORY: President Trump must reject a second Munich and hold firm against Iran

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 05:00:56 -0400

Americans must worry that Munich 2.0 looms.

2026 cannot become as infamous as 1938.

President Donald Trump’s dispatch of negotiators to Islamabad for the resumption of negotiations with the rump regime atop the Islamic Republic of Iran is a moment of peril for the world, the region, the people of Iran, Israel, the United States and, of course, for President Donald Trump.

There is no doubt that all of the above parties — except the Iranian regime and its proxies — are in much improved positions than they were on Feb. 27 — the eve of the battle with the Islamic Republic. The world is safer that the military and defense industrial might of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp is smashed and its proxy force of terrorists — Hezbollah in Lebanon — has been humbled again by the Israel Defense Forces. The leaders of the civilized world, whether they say it out loud or not, are relieved.

THE REAL IRAN THREAT IS IN BLACK AND WHITE: IT'S EVEN IN THEIR CONSTITUTION

But so too was the world relieved on Nov. 12, 1918, the day after the Allies’ armistice with the Kaiser’s Germany.

World War I was over with the signing of that armistice. World War II became inevitable that very same day because, in the aftermath of the "the war to end all wars," President Woodrow Wilson "lost" the peace.

Arguably the worst president of the last century, Wilson’s ego and academic approach to the world and its realities condemned the world to an encore war, one that would turn out to be worse by far than the one just concluded that long ago 11/11. President Wilson’s mantle was picked up by President Barack Obama. President Trump must reject the temptation of that cloak which covers disaster with the appearance of an agreement.

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The danger is that America (meaning, of course, President Trump) accepts half or even three-quarters of a loaf of a "deal," instead of demanding the capitulation of the rump regime in Iran.

That rump is run by "hardliners" — just like the hardliners who murdered tens of thousands of its own people in January and has imprisoned thousands more since while executing hundreds. Hardliners then and now are counting on the "soft" West to concede everything that matters in order to get gas prices down and the oil flowing to fully power the world’s economy. These fanatics believe they can out-negotiate President Trump. Doubtful, but possible.

President Trump is solely responsible for this negotiation. There is no Lloyd George, Clemenceau, or any of the many other parties who were present at the Paris peace talks at today’s table. The entire responsibility for whatever blame follows — this month, this year, this decade or even this century — rests with President Trump, just as the credit, if deserved, will as well.

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The negotiations that ended in the disastrous "Peace of Versailles," were a failure and there was no real peace at all. Long before Hitler arrived on the scene, Germany had begun to plan to rearm. The Islamic Republic cannot emerge from the ruins resolved not on reform but revenge.

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President Trump can agree to everything that doesn’t matter, but he cannot fold on the major points. The whole world knows what a victory looks like. President Trump should settle for nothing less than Iran’s abandonment of enrichment forever, the return of the "nuclear dust" to American control, an end to ballistic missile production and to support for terrorists, Iran’s "lunatics," as Secretary Marco Rubio bluntly described them this week. The people of Iran must have their basic human rights restored.

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President Trump’s place in history depends upon his resolve right now, as does — and far more importantly — freedom for the Iranian people and stability for the entire region. It is not too much to say that the next many decades for the whole world depend upon the president’s resolve this week and next.

We cannot have another Munich. A few days ago, President Trump stated the truth: The United Kingdom cannot afford another Neville Chamberlain. The United States can’t afford its first Chamberlain, or another President Obama.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HUGH HEWITT

LIZ PEEK: Warring Democrats will need more than Trump hatred to win in 2028

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 05:00:34 -0400

To paraphrase the late President Richard Nixon, what will Democrats do when they don’t have Donald Trump to kick around anymore?

It’s a valid question. Currently, shared hatred of Donald Trump is the baling wire holding the fractured Democratic Party together. The party is deeply divided over nearly every facet of government and policy, with progressives and moderates warring over taxes, gender issues, AI, climate change, law enforcement and Israel.

It isn’t at all clear who the party’s leaders are. Is it Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose approval rating nationally among Democrats barely clears 40%, or is it leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who may challenge Schumer for his Senate seat in 2028 but who is currently, astonishingly, under fire from progressives for trying to reach moderate voters?

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is among those criticizing his party’s lack of "vision," telling "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker, "We know very well what we oppose. What are we for?"

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He’s not the only Democrat critical of his party. At a recent DNC meeting in New Orleans, party officials were lambasted by progressives over their ongoing refusal to release the official autopsy explaining why they were scorched in the 2024 elections, a report that presumably could guide them forward. Axios has reported that DNC Chair Ken Martin fears the report could unleash "unnecessary party infighting"; he’s probably right.

Approaching the midterms, President Trump is less popular than he was during his prior term in office — by 7 points — but Democrats are a whopping 30 points behind where they were in 2018. Given the president’s many bold and controversial policy moves — from waging war against Iran, rebuilding the White House, implementing tariffs, bullying NATO and torching climate initiatives — those are remarkable readings. He has given the country — and Democrats — plenty to rail about.

Recently, scores of Democrats have threatened President Trump with impeachment or removal from office. Going into the midterm elections, Democrats, including California Rep. Ro Khanna and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, have promised that if they win control of the House, they will impeach President Trump again. In a recent MS Now interview, Khanna said, "Absolutely, he should be impeached now ... and the Democrats will impeach him once we take back the House and should impeach him for all the things he’s done."

DAVID MARCUS: THE 3 ISSUES DRIVING FAR-LEFT'S SPLIT WITH DEMS

While not specifying what those "things" are, Khanna is, in effect, promising to put the country through more show trials and more bitter congressional hearings that do not improve the lives of average Americans and, assuming Democrats don’t achieve the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict, are an exercise in futility.

Not only have Democrats threatened impeachment, they have also vowed to go after anyone who worked in the White House as part of the current administration and even private businesses that cooperated with the Trump White House. This, from a party that wails that President Trump is out for "vengeance" and has weaponized his Justice Department to punish his enemies.

The leader of that program was former Rep. Eric Swalwell, who has ignominiously been drummed out of public office, accused of sexual assault. The ex-congressman proposed to act as judge and jury in making President Trump pay for his sins, promising: "We’re going into the majority a year from now. ... We will bring oversight and accountability, we will subpoena the Department of Justice, but also private actors who have done these drug deals with the administration, college campuses, entertainment companies, law firms. Accountability is coming."

LIZ PEEK: DEMOCRATS CHEER MAMDANI'S WIN — THEY'LL BE CRYING SOON ENOUGH

The singular focus on "resisting" Donald Trump may provide plenty of dopamine and give Democrats ample opportunity to get together and parade around in weird costumes, but it isn’t building credibility or a popular political party. A recent CNN poll shows only 28% of Americans hold a favorable view of the Democratic Party, with the Republican Party a few points higher at 32%.

If Democrats believed they had more to offer, they wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to reshape the electoral map in purple Virginia to their advantage and wouldn’t be working so hard to topple the Electoral College, which they believe favors Republicans. That effort is real and, according to a recent Washington Post op-ed, is gaining momentum.

When Trump leaves office, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party will go after moderate Democrats full-bore. The Zohran Mamdani-Bernie Sanders faction will insist on pushing tax hikes that threaten our economy, limitations on data centers and Big Tech that will undermine our global lead in innovation, and workplace policies that will slow productivity, as they have in France and Germany, while stifling energy development in service to green activists who are ignorant of reality.

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Their growing clout among young — often ignorant — voters makes these threats real. The election of Mamdani, a young, telegenic socialist with no meaningful credentials, to be mayor of New York was a wake-up call to adults in the room. Democrats are increasingly being led and funded by ideologues whose agendas are unrealistic and impossibly expensive.

Sadly, young voters have not been taught why socialism has repeatedly failed, leaving the citizens of once-wealthy countries worse off. They believed that Mamdani could deliver free buses and control rents without destroying the housing market. They actually look forward to a government-run grocery store that magically prices goods below market; they didn’t grow up reading about how people in the Soviet Union had to stand in line for hours to buy a loaf of bread in stores where the shelves were perpetually bare.

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History suggests that Democrats will retake the House in November. They will run on an "affordability" agenda and hope voters don’t ask why the most expensive places to live in the U.S. are all run by Democrats. They will mostly bury their differences and campaign on opposing the president.

But come 2028, Democrats will go to war — with each other. And hating Donald Trump will not be good enough.

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Kyle Busch sends Hamlin chilling threat, NASCAR wife is 'America's Most Beautiful' & 1st black female wrecked

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:16:55 -0400

Look, I'm not sure how it would look, but ... have we ever thought about maybe giving Kansas some bigger responsibilities during the NASCAR Cup Series season? As in, the championship race? I know we're going to start rotating those bad boys moving forward. I'm thinking Kansas should be on the list.

No offense to Miami. Yes, offense to Phoenix. Kansas might clear them both.

KYLE BUSCH WILL BE ON ‘HANG OUT WITH SEAN HANNITY’ APRIL 21: LISTEN HERE

Tough to argue with THAT Tyler Reddick win, right? I know I give Tiny Tyler a hard time, and it's nothing personal, I promise. I just don't know that Tyler Reddick winning a BILLION races is great for ratings.

But, Sunday's win was impressive. Any time you pass Kyle Larson on the final turn, you're doing something right.

That's five wins in the first nine races for Reddick. Five. He's won over half of 'em, for those who don't do great with math. And how about this for a stat that may or may not sit well with the old-timers ... Reddick is the first driver to win five of the first nine automobile races in a season since someone named Dale Earnhardt did it back in 1987.

Goodness gracious.

Anyway, congrats to Tiny Tyler. Nothing negative from me today. But, we've got bigger matters to attend to ...

Like, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch nearing a boiling point. That's right. I think they might kill each other soon. When I tell you that Kyle Busch is MISERABLE, this is what I mean. Head on a swivel. You'll see.

What else? I've also got more #content out of the race wives, including Tara Allmendinger competing for "America's Most Beautiful," and one of the nastier wrecks you'll see down in the O'Reilly (Busch) Series.

KYLE LARSON STEALS NASCAR CUP SERIES CHAMPIONSHIP, DELIVERS HEARTBREAK FOR DENNY HAMLIN

And if that's not enough, I've got Jeremy Mayfield (remember him?!) taking a blowtorch to the Cup Series after Bristol.

Four tires, a couple drops of Sunoco racing fuel, and maybe a full-time bodyguard for Denny Hamlin ... Monday Morning Pit-Stop — the 'Denny Stuffs Kyle In A Locker And Spits In His Face Before Slamming The Door' edition — is LIVE!

Kyle Busch vs. Denny Hamlin isn't a battle on the track, but ...

With all due respect to Tiny Tyler and yesterday's wild finish, we're going to start with Denny vs. Kyle because I know drama when I see it. I can smell it. And this, folks, is DRAMA.

This is what it's all about ... in 2026, at least. Kyle Busch getting PISSED at Denny Hamlin, the podcaster. Not Denny the Racer. Denny the Podcaster. Amazing.

So, obviously Denny crossed a line on his show last week. Kyle is (was?) clearly a subscriber, and let his ex-teammate HAVE it before Kansas:

"People don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, and in this instance, I don’t feel like Denny Hamlin even knows what the hell he’s talking about. So he can bash me all he wants — and I can certainly make his life hell.

"If Denny wants to switch cars, I’ll switch cars with him any day of the week, any time. I would love for him to show me that he can carry it better than I can."

Goodness gracious. There are a lot of folks in the NASCAR Cup Series garage I think I could take. Kyle Busch is so far down on that list, I'm not even sure he's on it. He's massive. He's, clearly, miserable. That's a bad combination. A dangerous one.

Now, as for Denny, here's what he said:

Tough to argue with Denny Hamlin here

That's obviously not the full clip, but you get the picture. Here's what Kyle's former JGR pal also said during his podcast:

"Kyle Busch, I can’t hold the guy’s helmet talent-wise. But this is not new. He’s struggled for five years now. We have to be honest about our expectations. If you’re expecting Kyle Busch to go just back to victory lane on a regular basis, you are kidding yourselves, and you’re going to be very disappointed.

"Clearly, RCR is not good right now, but you’re a Hall of Fame, Mount Rushmore driver. Carry it better than your teammate then, OK? If you’re the greatest, carry it better than your teammate who has won (six) races. Find a way. I think that’s what he should be able to do, but it’s not happening."

And, of course, Hamlin had to respond himself after Kyle threatened to beat the piss out of him (I'm paraphrasing!):

I'll be honest with you ... I'm with Denny here. A) he's 100% right in what he said last week. I've said it for years now. Kyle Busch stinks. He has stunk. He will probably keep stinking in this car, and with this team.

And it pains me to say it, because I love Kyle Busch. He was once on pace to break all sorts of records. Now his average finish is in the 20s.

But B) what else is Denny Hamlin supposed to say here? It's a podcast. A very, very, very popular NASCAR podcast, at Dale Jr.'s company, featuring one of the most polarizing drivers in the sport. He was asked about Kyle Busch's struggles at RCR. He answered with honesty.

Kyle isn't mad because Denny said any of that. He's mad because he said it all out loud.

Anyway, let me know what you think! Zach.Dean@OutKick.com.

Let's get back to racing and start this week off with a bang!

What a NASCAR finish, what a NASCAR WRECK & Tara takes us into a big week

Again, Kansas should probably (definitely) be in the mix for the championship race down the road here. Those final two laps were something.

This woke Next Gen car has killed the short tracks and the big ones, but the medium ones are thriving. It's one of the very nice things Kyle Busch and I will say about it!

PS: Don't forget who gave Tyler Reddick the chance to win in overtime. Cody Ware, baby!

Amazing. Cody Ware is so bad, and he picks just the worst times to prove it. Denny is so defeated. Amazing #content.

OK, couple quickies on the way out. Speaking of amazing NASCAR #content, we don't see 'em wreck quite like this anymore:

You don't see cars flips like that in today's world, and you really don't see them flip like that at a place like Kansas. Wild. Carson walked away just fine, which is why we can bury it way down here at the bottom instead of it being a ... bigger ... story.

Next? You know what was a big story last week? Bristol being half-empty in the stands, and half-empty in living rooms across the country. It didn't look great on TV. At all.

Jeremy Mayfield took it .. a step further ... via a scathing Facebook post about the race:

"When the biggest story is how many people are staying home to watch a golf tournament in Georgia, the sport is in a coma. Ty Gibbs gets his first win in front of 100,000 empty seats. It looked like a COVID era race out there.

"If the ‘World’s Fastest Half Mile’ can’t out draw a Sunday at Augusta, then NASCAR has officially lost the south. Is it the car? Is it the drivers? Or has the "Colosseum" just become a graveyard? Tell me I'm wrong."

I surely ain't telling you that, Jeremy! I wrote about it twice last week. In no world should Bristol be empty. It's OK for New Hampshire to look rough in July. I get that. But Bristol in April? Unacceptable.

LOOK at these grandstands:

Yikes. Not great.

Two more on the way out. I promise I'll be quick, because this has been a weirdly long class. First? The ARCA Series made history this week that I'm sure all NASCAR fans will love to hear about!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Dystany Spurlock became the first black female to compete in a race, and she promptly got wrecked in a pretty ... jarring ... way:

Yikes. Not great! I don't know what's more shocking — the wreck, or the fact that Spurlock was a lap down in 10th. Tenth!

OK, that's it for today. Again, a long class, but an important one. Not enough race WAGs, though. That's on me. I'll wear that one on the chin.

Here's Tara Allmendinger throwing her hat in the ring for 'America's Most Beautiful' this July.

See you at 'Dega.

How Trump panic broke the Democratic Party and fueled endless crisis politics

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:00:50 -0400

Since 2016, Democrats have increasingly asked voters to rally not around a compelling vision of America’s future, but around fear of what happens if Donald Trump returns. Every election is cast as the final firewall before catastrophe. Democracy is on the ballot. Institutions are under siege. The country cannot survive another Trump term. Some of those warnings may be sincerely felt, and some may even be justified. But when politics becomes an endless sequence of alarms, something deeper begins to erode: a political party can forget how to talk about anything beyond the emergency itself.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I often see what happens when people organize their lives around preventing old pain from recurring. Their thinking narrows into vigilance, avoidance, and threat management. Instead of moving toward the life they want, they become consumed with making sure the worst thing never happens again. It’s a pattern I explore more broadly in my forthcoming book, Therapy Nation, and it offers a useful lens for understanding what has happened to Democratic politics.

For a decade now, the Democratic Party’s most emotionally coherent message has often been less about what kind of country it wants to build than what catastrophe must be prevented. That urgency has been politically useful. It unified some moderates, progressives, and uneasy independents who agreed on little except the need to stop Trump. But every election framed primarily as catastrophe prevention carries a hidden psychological cost: it trains voters to experience politics as permanent emergency management. A party can sound endlessly clear about the danger it sees while remaining frustratingly vague about the future it wants to create. Alarm can drive turnout, but it is far less effective at building durable allegiance.

WHEN WE CALL EVERYTHING AN 'ISM,' WE STOP HEARING WHAT VOTERS ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT

Politics can fall into the same trap. For Democrats, 2016 was more than an election loss. It shattered a story many in the party had quietly internalized: that demographic momentum, elite cultural influence, and even the arc of history itself were all moving in their direction. Hillary Clinton’s defeat disrupted a sense of inevitability that had shaped elite political assumptions for years. What followed was understandable. The central strategic question became how to prevent Trump’s return.

In the short term, that worked. Opposition created discipline. It supplied urgency, money, turnout, and a common emotional language for an otherwise unwieldy coalition. But fear is an unstable long-term motivator. Think of the patient who starts exercising only after his doctor warns that he is nearing a heart attack. Panic may get him into the gym, but that motivation often fades once the immediate danger recedes.

By contrast, the person training for a marathon is driven by something more durable: a vision of who he wants to become. The discipline lasts because it is attached to aspiration, identity, and a meaningful future. Political parties are no different. A movement can win moments by telling voters what must be stopped, but it builds lasting identity only by telling them what future is worth creating.

That is where Democrats now appear stuck. Their strongest unifying message too often remains the need to block Trump, defend institutions from him, or prevent a return to the disruption he represents. Those arguments can mobilize in the short run, but they do not answer the deeper democratic question voters eventually ask: what positive national story are you offering? You can see the problem in the way nearly every policy disagreement, court ruling, or election result is now narrated as existential collapse rather than ordinary democratic conflict.

DEMOCRATS ARE MAKING A CRITICAL MISTAKE — AND VOTERS ARE LETTING THEM KNOW

The long-term cost of reactive politics is identity. Fear creates short-term cohesion while postponing hard debates over class, immigration, public safety, economic aspiration, and cultural priorities. Those tensions do not disappear simply because a coalition remains emotionally united against a threat. They remain unresolved beneath the surface, only to return later with greater force. What fear suppresses, it never truly reconciles.

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That is why Democratic identity has felt unstable. When opposition becomes the organizing force, aspiration gets crowded out. Strategy turns defensive. The political imagination narrows. A movement that defines itself mainly by the threat it opposes eventually risks becoming psychologically captive to that threat.

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Over time, the cost is fatigue and exhaustion. When politics becomes an endless sequence of alarms, citizens begin to lose faith in the possibility of collective progress itself. Democracy starts to feel less like self-government and more like perpetual triage. Cynicism hardens. Trust erodes.

Voters will rally around danger for a while, but eventually they want something more sustaining: direction, purpose, and a future they can actually see themselves living in. Fear may win elections, but vision builds governing identity.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JONATHAN ALPERT

Top Democrat governors are hoping to ride their records to the White House. Can they?

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:00:22 -0400

The midterms are quickly approaching, and while political pundits are focused on the battle for the U.S. House and Senate, a handful of governors’ races could have a significant impact on 2028.

Governors serve as the chief executive of their state, with broad authority to enforce laws, oversee state agencies and manage the executive branch. Those agencies shape everything from education to healthcare, business regulation, public safety, infrastructure and public health. This November, Americans in 36 states will head to the ballot box to decide who holds that power — and they should choose carefully.

Although state politics is often overshadowed by Washington, D.C., nothing quite shapes American daily life like what happens at the state level — and the governor sits at the center of it all.

Voters should pay close attention to the gubernatorial races in Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Democratic Govs. JB Pritzker, Wes Moore and Josh Shapiro are all seeking re-election while quietly auditioning for 2028. The Democrat Party’s bench of possible contenders consists primarily of current or former governors — a notable shift from recent years of nominating candidates from Capitol Hill.

TOP REPUBLICAN WITH 'ARMY' OF SUPPORTERS MAKES MAJOR CAMPAIGN ANNOUNCEMENT AS SHAPIRO LAUNCHES RE-ELECT

With California Gov. Gavin Newsom widely seen as the early Democratic frontrunner for 2028, he’s not facing voters this cycle, so the races in Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania may be the most important referendum voters get on the Democratic governing model for the next two years. Their records in office offer a preview of how they might actually govern should they win the nomination.

On the economic front, high taxes and a complex regulatory environment have defined these states — and delivered poor results for the people who live there. With nearly 280,000 regulatory restrictions on the books, Illinois has the fourth most burdensome regulatory code in the nation.

Maryland, as the state with the fourth most burdensome income tax system, ranks among the bottom five worst states for tax competitiveness. Pennsylvania ranks third-worst for childcare freedom, behind only New York and Vermont, raising costs for working families.

THE DEMOCRAT JAMES CARVILLE THINKS IS WORTH WATCHING IN 2028 WILL SURPRISE YOU

Across all three states, the overall tax and regulatory burdens have made it increasingly expensive just to stay put, and residents are starting to vote with their feet. IRS data shows taxpayers in all three states are fleeing to lower-tax havens, taking billions in income with them.

The candidates’ records on education fare no better. All three governors have shunned the growing support for school choice and alternative education options — choosing instead to bow to politically connected teachers’ unions over the best interests of students and their families.

Pritzker's first budget proposed gutting Illinois’ only school choice program, and in 2023 lawmakers let it expire entirely — stripping nearly 10,000 low-income children, most of them Black or Hispanic, of their scholarships. In Pennsylvania, Shapiro campaigned on supporting school choice but eventually caved to union pressure and vetoed a $100 million scholarship program he had personally backed — abandoning the low-income families he had promised to help. Moore acted similarly. In 2023, he attempted to cut funding for Maryland’s BOOST Scholarship program, which helps low-income kids attend private schools.

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On energy, all three governors have pursued regressive green energy agendas that have come at a steep cost for consumers. Illinois electricity prices rose roughly 15% in a single year — more than double the national average — while Maryland residents have seen rates climb significantly since 2020.

Pennsylvania tells a similar story: despite being a state blessed with abundant natural gas and coal resources, electricity rates have increased 46% since 2018, driven by green energy mandates, complex permitting and the shutdown of baseload plants — leaving the average Pennsylvanian paying $210 more annually than the national average. And Shapiro shows no signs of reversing course. If his energy agenda advances, Pennsylvania families could see their annual electricity costs nearly double from $1,717 in 2023 to $3,471 in 2035.

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These records matter beyond the borders of Illinois, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Governors’ races rarely get the national attention they deserve, but this cycle is different. Names like California’s Gavin Newsom, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear are all part of the 2028 conversation, alongside Pritzker, Shapiro and Moore. For the first time in years, governors’ races offer a window into what we could see in 2028.

Pritzker, Shapiro and Moore will spend the coming months making the case that their states are better off under their leadership. Their constituents — and a country sizing up the next generation of Democratic contenders — should take a close look to see whether that case holds up.

GORDON SONDLAND: Stay the course with Iran, President Trump. It's like breaking a horse

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Getting Iran to capitulate is like breaking a wild horse. Anyone who’s done it — or even watched it done — knows how this goes. Calm one minute, violent the next. You get a step forward, then you lose half of it back. The horse is testing you — your patience, your resolve, your willingness to stay in the saddle when it tries to throw you.

That’s Iran.

And here’s the part the foreign policy commentariat still doesn’t get: Donald Trump actually understands this dynamic.

WHAT COMES NEXT IN THE IRAN WAR? WHAT THIS CEASEFIRE WILL AND WON'T DO

Not from theory. From instinct.

Iran is not a normal negotiating partner. It’s not even a unified one. Power is fragmented across clerics, politicians, intelligence services and, most importantly, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a state within a state that answers to ideology, money and survival.

And inside that system are hard-liners who don’t want a deal — period. These are people who would rather burn down the house than give up their nuclear potential, their offshore wealth and their grip on power. For them, compromise isn’t a concession. It’s extinction.

IRAN’S NUCLEAR GAMBLE LEAVES AMERICA ONE CHOICE — AND IT CAN'T BE A DEAL

So when I hear the usual noise — why the mixed signals, why the tough talk one day and restraint the next — I have to laugh. That critique assumes we’re dealing with rational, Western-style negotiators who respond to consistency and good-faith process.

We’re not.

We’re dealing with a regime that has spent 45 years perfecting delay, deception and division. Show them a straight line and they’ll run circles around it. Telegraph your endgame and they’ll stall you to death.

STEVE FORBES: IRAN’S NUCLEAR INSANITY LEAVES AMERICA AND ALLIES NO ROOM TO BLINK

What Trump is doing — whether people like his style or not — is exactly what this situation demands: pressure, pause, pressure again. Open a door, then make it very clear what happens if they try to game it. Keep them off balance. Keep them guessing.

That’s not chaos. That’s leverage.

And here’s where the leverage really comes from — and it’s something most analysts either miss or are too uncomfortable to say out loud.

AMB GORDON SONDLAND: NATO BLINKED ON IRAN, AND TRUMP HAS EVERY RIGHT TO BE FURIOUS

The leverage is the overwhelming military capability that’s been assembled — and the very clear willingness to use it if the horse needs a severe correction.

Not as bluster. Not as background noise. As a credible, ever-present option.

Tehran understands that when push comes to shove, this isn’t an academic exercise. The same apparatus that can impose sanctions can also impose consequences — rapidly and decisively — against leadership targets, command structures and critical infrastructure if the regime crosses the line or continues to play rope-a-dope.

ROBERT MAGINNIS: WHY ISLAMABAD TALKS WERE ALWAYS DOOMED TO FAIL

That reality changes behavior.

It forces calculations inside a regime that has historically believed it could outlast, outmaneuver or simply exhaust Western resolve. It introduces doubt where there used to be confidence. It sharpens the internal debate between those who want to test limits and those who understand the cost of getting it wrong.

This is, at its core, a test of wills and power, carried out to its logical conclusion.

WHY TRUMP, IRAN SEEM LIGHT-YEARS APART ON ANY POSSIBLE DEAL TO END THE WAR

Most leaders don’t understand that. They look for an off-ramp too early. They prioritize optics over outcomes. They confuse activity with achievement.

Trump doesn’t.

He understands that if you ease off before the dynamic shifts, you don’t get a better deal — you get played. He understands that credibility isn’t built on statements; it’s built on a demonstrated willingness to act. And he understands that regimes like Iran only recalibrate when the alternative becomes unacceptable.

MORNING GLORY: THE US-IRAN NEGOTIATIONS IN ISLAMABAD BECAME REYKJAVÍK 2.0

That’s what’s happening now.

And yes, it makes people uneasy.

Turn on the TV and it’s a minute-by-minute panic cycle. Gas prices tick up — breaking news. Some leak hits the wires — six hours of speculation. Who said what at 9 a.m. versus 3 p.m. — treated like it’s dispositive.

NO RETREAT AT HORMUZ — IRAN MUST NOT CONTROL THE WORLD’S ENERGY LIFELINE

It’s noise.

This is not a daily trading strategy. This is a generational geopolitical play.

The upside, if we get this right, is enormous. A truly non-nuclear Iran changes the entire equation in the Middle East. It removes the single biggest destabilizing force in the region.

PAKISTANI GENERAL SAYS IRAN DIPLOMACY STILL 'ALIVE, DESPITE US BLOCKADE, FAILED TALKS

Imagine a world where Iran is not shooting at Israel, not funding proxy militias across multiple theaters and not sitting on the threshold of a nuclear weapon. Even if the regime remains clerical, its ability to wreak havoc is dramatically reduced.

That opens the door to something real — trade, investment, normalization. Stronger economic ties between Israel, the Gulf states, the United States and beyond. Capital flows instead of capital flight. Stability instead of constant brinkmanship.

That’s what’s on the table.

STEVE FORBES: NO MORE DELUSIONS — AMERICA HAS TO FINISH THE JOB IN IRAN

Now look at Europe.

The Europeans, predictably, want to make the campaign contribution after the candidate has already won the election. They’ll criticize the tone, question the tactics and keep one foot in and one foot out — until the outcome is clear.

Then they’ll show up and declare themselves indispensable.

TRUMP PUSHED IRAN TO THE BRINK — BUT DID WE WIN ANYTHING THAT LASTS?

We’ve seen this movie before.

The reality is that without sustained American pressure — economic and military — there is no deal worth having. None. Iran has no incentive to move unless it believes the alternative is materially worse.

That’s what Trump has restored: credibility.

MORNING GLORY: PRESIDENT TRUMP LEADS THE WEST TO A BIG WIN AGAINST IRAN

And credibility is everything in this kind of negotiation.

What’s required now is discipline. Not second-guessing every tactical move. Not flinching every time there’s volatility. Certainly not pulling back just because the process looks messy.

Of course it’s messy. It’s supposed to be.

ONE MONTH AT WAR WITH IRAN — CAN WASHINGTON DEFINE VICTORY?

Breaking a horse is messy. Push too hard and you get thrown. Ease off too soon and you lose control. The key is staying on long enough for the dynamic to change.

That’s what’s happening here.

The pressure is real. Iran’s economy is under strain. Its currency has taken repeated hits. Public dissatisfaction is not theoretical — it’s visible. And inside the regime, the debate over how far they can push — and how much they can take — is intensifying.

NOT BLUFFING: STEPHEN MILLER SAYS TRUMP IS DIRECTLY INVOLVED, 'HOLDS ALL THE CARDS' IN IRAN NEGOTIATIONS

That’s progress.

Not a signing ceremony. Not a neat press release. Pressure.

So let’s take a breath.

WHY TRUMP FACES AN AGONIZING DECISION ON OBLITERATING IRAN’S OIL SUPPLY IF HE CAN’T GET A DEAL

Stop obsessing over hourly gas prices. Stop parsing every headline like it’s the final chapter. This is a long game, and it’s being played at a level that requires patience and nerve.

The stakes are enormous. A neutered, non-nuclear Iran removes the last major obstacle to a more stable, more prosperous Middle East — one where trade, not terror, defines its relationships.

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You don’t get there with process. You get there with pressure.

And for all the noise, that’s exactly what Trump is delivering.

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He’s staying in the saddle.

And that’s how you break the horse.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM GORDON SONDLAND

MARY KATHARINE HAM: Republicans have a huge MAHA opportunity in 2026 — if they don’t blow it

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:00:09 -0400

It’s election year, and in a midterm year, sometimes holding a coalition together can feel as tough as getting your family through spring sports, spring musicals, spring break and spring allergies all at once. This is where Republicans can take some advice and inspiration from the very suburban parent voters whose support they need in key districts this fall.

As someone who’s spent years talking to center-right women, I can tell you this: health and wellness are not niche issues. They’re not "woo-woo" or fringe. They’re kitchen-table, group-text, grocery-aisle stuff. It’s what moms are talking about while swapping tips about sleep, anxiety and the cleanest snacks they can find for their toddlers.

The MAHA movement, championed by figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and embraced rhetorically by President Donald Trump, taps into something real that appeals to people across income, racial and party lines: Americans are exhausted by chronic disease, ultra-processed food and rising childhood obesity. A broad spectrum of parents is also concerned about increased screen time, social media use and their effects on children’s mental health.

Women — especially moms — are often the chief health officers of their households. They are looking for leaders who acknowledge that something is off and are willing to challenge entrenched interests, which moms often suspect are making their health choices harder.

GOVERNMENT SAYS 'EAT BETTER' BUT MAKES IT HARDER TO FEED YOUR FAMILY

That’s the opportunity. Along with them, I’ve moved from trust in institutions to skepticism. I’ve been burned by big promises and become more concerned about having options that serve my family by being preventive instead of reactive.

A 2025 KFF/Washington Post poll found that more than 80% of parents, both MAHA and nonaligned, agree on the need for change and transparency on additives, highly processed foods and sugar content. A whopping 75% of parents ranked social media use as a major threat to children’s health and have led to a sea change in support for practical solutions, like cellphone bans in schools. Those parental priorities are reflected in the MAHA Commission Report, released in 2025, which covers them all. It was a welcome change from the surgeon general’s report on youth mental health during the Biden administration in 2021, which managed to reduce school closures and increased screen time required by those closures to a literal footnote.

Republicans who frame MAHA around these concerns — and around empowering families to solve them by giving parents better information, improving food quality, supporting maternal health, investing in metabolic health and encouraging transparency — can build a coalition that includes suburban women who may not agree with the GOP on every issue but desperately want a culture shift around health.

HEALTHCARE, ECONOMY AND THE 'ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL': WELCOME TO THE MIDTERMS

And it’s not just words, but actions. An expansion of Health Savings Accounts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act allows millions more Americans to use their own money for their own decisions, tax-free, and to put it toward primary care and telehealth. Congressional Republicans also required more price transparency from benefits managers as a tool for bringing down drug prices.

But here’s where the danger creeps in.

When the conversation turns to limiting access to common medications like Tylenol during pregnancy, broadly casting doubt on vaccines or heavy-handed censorship of healthcare information through avenues like drug ads, which creates speech concerns, the political calculus changes — fast.

VIVEK RAMASWAMY TURNS TO CONSERVATIVE YOUTH TO SHAPE THE MOVEMENT’S NEXT PHASE, ANALYZES 2026 RACES

One reason President Trump had such a strong coalition in 2024 was the response to overreach during the pandemic — with an administration that believed it knew better than I did what was good for my kids. But if MAHA means simply substituting RFK’s personal pet views on things like vaccines and pharmaceutical ads for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s, then we’re not solving the problem.

Voters distinguish between "We want more transparency and safety data" and "We want to make it harder for you to access routine care." The latter sounds destabilizing, and when it comes to health issues, the Affordable Care Act gave them enough of that to last a generation.

There’s also a deeper risk: conflating skepticism with cynicism.

NEWT GINGRICH: REPUBLICANS GET SECOND CHANCE TO FINALLY FIX HEALTHCARE

Many voters want reform because institutions have lost their trust. I’m one of them. But they don’t want to burn those institutions down. Democrats held a 20-point edge on the issue of education for generations, but long-term school closures by politically motivated school boards and unions gave Republicans a chance to peel off some of those voters with commonsense, concrete approaches as simple as opening schools and unmasking toddlers. Healthcare is another perennial Democratic strong suit, but bad pandemic policies degraded trust and gave Republicans a shot at these voters in 2024.

To keep these voters, keep it commonsense and concrete. For instance, where education and health intersect — kids, school and screen time — it has become a bipartisan no-brainer, as 38 states have enacted some kind of screen limitation in schools, with Republican-led states like Florida, Indiana and Virginia under former Gov. Glenn Youngkin leading the charge.

Polling shows that, even in the MAHA coalition, support for routine vaccines like MMR is high, while skepticism remains about COVID and flu vaccines, or their timing, which these voters put in a different category. Their thinking, like the coalition itself, is not simple or monolithic. They want improvements, guardrails and accountability, but get nervous about sweeping restrictions that feel like experimentation.

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And it doesn’t hurt to have the food pyramid finally catch up with common sense in a concrete and beautifully designed graphic that inverts the bad advice of yore. I knew at 12 years old that 11 carb servings wasn’t a great idea. More Eat Real Food, less RFK and Kid Rock in a cold plunge, is where you find persuadable voters.

The MAHA coalition includes a range of voices — some mainstream reformers, some longtime skeptics of pharmaceutical companies and some who have made a career out of questioning vaccines and established medical consensus. Republicans heading into a midterm year have to decide which lane they’re running in.

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It can absolutely be a blessing. It broadens the party’s appeal, especially with women who want a healthier country for their kids.

Midterms are decided in the margins, by addition, not subtraction. They’re decided by voters who may like parts of the Republican economic message but still worry about cultural turbulence or instability. If Democrats are able to run ads accusing Republicans of threatening access to vaccines, pain relievers or basic healthcare information, that errant pitch will not stay confined to cable news debates. It will land in the T-ball stands on Saturday mornings.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM MARY KATHARINE HAM

Trump may claim he won the fight with Iran, but there’s a bigger war already underway

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:00:04 -0400

The Iran conflict appears to be winding down. If the fragile ceasefire holds, President Donald Trump may stand before the American people in coming days and declare victory — shipping lanes reopened, deterrence restored, the ayatollahs humbled. On its face, that would be a genuine achievement.

The Iran campaign wasn’t wrong. Confronting a nuclear-threshold regime that funded terrorism across three continents and threatened international shipping lanes was a legitimate strategic necessity. Trump acted where others hesitated.

But every consequential action carries second- and third-order effects — and those now unfolding extend well beyond what any victory headline can contain.

While Washington has been grinding down Iran’s military infrastructure, something far more consequential has been hardening in the background: a China-Russia-Iran strategic alignment accelerating the fracture of the post-Cold War world order — and that fracture now runs directly through the transatlantic alliance itself.

AMB GORDON SONDLAND: NATO BLINKED ON IRAN, AND TRUMP HAS EVERY RIGHT TO BE FURIOUS

Xi’s signal cannot be dismissed

On April 15, meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Beijing, Chinese President Xi Jinping declared that China-Russia ties are especially "precious" amid global turbulence. He called for "closer and stronger strategic collaboration" to reshape the international order in what he described as a "more just and reasonable direction."

That is not diplomatic boilerplate. That is a geopolitical declaration.

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sharpened the message at that same Beijing meeting, declaring that Iran holds an "inalienable" right to enrich uranium — a direct, public rebuke of Trump’s core demand for zero enrichment, and proof that Moscow is not merely watching this conflict but actively shielding Tehran’s nuclear position.

Xi and Putin spent the Iran war watching from the sidelines — but not standing still. According to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment reviewed by Reuters, Russia provided Iran with satellite imagery and cyber support — unconfirmed, but consistent with Moscow’s pattern of proxy warfare.

Russia also publicly called on Washington to abandon "the language of ultimatums" on Tehran, proposed taking custody of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, and reaped a windfall as Brent crude surged toward $120 a barrel — a price surge that directly bankrolled Putin’s war of choice in Ukraine at the precise moment American forces were tied down in the Gulf.

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China’s support stopped short of confirmed combat involvement, but its strategic weight was substantial. Beijing purchased over 80% of Iran’s exported oil at discounted prices, keeping Tehran financially viable through the bombardment. Chinese-linked tankers remained active in Iranian oil transit even amid blockade conditions.

Trump acknowledged the concern directly: he exchanged letters with Xi Jinping after hearing reports that Beijing was supplying shoulder-fired and anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran. Xi’s response, in Trump’s own words, said "essentially, he’s not doing that" — and Trump threatened a 50% additional tariff if proven otherwise.

In January 2026, Iran, China, and Russia formalized a comprehensive trilateral strategic pact — not a mutual defense treaty, but a framework for nuclear, economic and military alignment. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has tracked this emerging "CRINK" alignment — China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — and the data shows it hardening, not softening, under American military pressure.

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This is the strategic trap Washington has walked into. Pressure on Iran did not isolate Tehran — it drove the axis tighter.

NATO is fracturing on Washington’s watch

The Iran war has done more damage to the Western alliance than any Russian influence operation in decades.

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Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg reminded the world from the official NATO lectern that NATO "is a defensive Alliance … not threatening anyone" — an alliance built in 1949 to defend Western Europe against Soviet aggression, not to launch discretionary wars of choice in the Middle East.

When Trump demanded warships from NATO allies France, Germany, Italy, and Britain — and separately from non-NATO partners Australia and Japan — to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Australia, and Japan all refused.

Trump called their refusal a stain on the alliance that will "never disappear" and announced he is strongly considering withdrawing the United States from NATO — calling it a "paper tiger." The administration has since discussed pulling American troops from European soil.

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Jim Townsend, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Europe and NATO, put it plainly: "We are closer to a break than we have ever been." Seventy-seven years of collective deterrence — the architecture that kept Soviet tanks out of Western Europe — is teetering, not because Putin outmaneuvered us, but because we fractured it ourselves in the middle of a Middle Eastern war.

Both understand that a United States estranged from its democratic allies is a United States strategically weakened — regardless of how many Iranian bunkers lie in rubble.

The real battlefield is bigger than Iran

Across three books — "Alliance of Evil" (2018), "Preparing for World War III" (2024), and "The New AI Cold War" (2026) — I have tracked the civilizational contest now underway. The Iran war is a chapter in it.

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China and Russia have used this conflict as a live training exercise — studying American carrier operations, missile intercept patterns and logistics flows in real time. Every signature revealed in the Gulf feeds directly into Beijing’s Taiwan invasion planning.

Meanwhile, the December 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy still treats China and Russia as separate problems — a strategic blind spot that would have alarmed President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who spent careers preventing exactly that coalition.

Proverbs 11:14 states it plainly: "Where there is no guidance, a people falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety." A strategy that isolates its allies and misreads its adversaries is not strength. It is the architecture of eventual defeat.

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The real question is not whether Trump can declare victory over Iran. He likely can. The question is what that victory costs: a NATO alliance pushed to its breaking point and a Sino-Russian partnership hardened by American overextension.

Great-power competition is decided in the accumulation of alignments, relationships and credibility built or squandered over years. Winning in Tehran while losing in Brussels and Beijing is not a net victory. It is a strategic setback dressed in tactical success.

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President Trump has the instincts of a dealmaker. The moment to make the critical deals — with NATO, against the axis — is right now, before the victory speech becomes the last act rather than the opening of the next strategic chapter.

Because Xi Jinping is not congratulating us. He is calculating.

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