The Fuse Was Already Lit

Here is the timeline Navarro hopes you ignore. When Donald Trump took office in January 2025, year-over-year inflation was already trending downward. The Consumer Price Index had fallen to roughly 3.0 percent that month and kept cooling to 2.3 percent by April 2025, which was the lowest rate since early 2021 (U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 2026). Then came “Liberation Day” and the president’s sweeping tariffs. By September 2025, inflation had climbed back to 3.02 percent, the highest annual rate since May 2024. Core goods inflation, which had been negative throughout 2024, started accelerating in April 2025 and kept rising (U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 2026). The Twelve-Day War with Iran did not begin until June 2025, and the massive escalation that closed the Strait of Hormuz did not happen until February 28, 2026 (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). In other words, the fuse was burning long before the major conflagration, and it was lit in the West Wing with a stack of tariff orders.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas put a number on this. In May 2026, its economists estimated that realized tariff collections had added about 0.80 percentage points to core personal consumption expenditures inflation by March 2026, and that absent those tariffs, core inflation would have been 2.3 percent (Mau & Smith, 2026). Researchers at Harvard Business School similarly found that Trump’s tariffs had increased CPI inflation by 0.7 percentage points by September 2025 (U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 2026). Goldman Sachs estimated that American consumers were absorbing up to 55 percent of tariff costs (U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 2026). So when Navarro claims Iran is the arsonist, he is asking you to ignore the fire inspector’s report that clearly shows sparks flying from the president’s own trade policy.

A History Lesson for People Who Can’t Read Graphs

Navarro spends a good chunk of his article relitigating 1979, 1983, 1996, and every other year he can find to paint Iran as a cartoon villain. It is an impressive exercise in emotional manipulation, but it has nothing to do with the price of milk in Ohio in 2025. The 1979 energy crisis happened because of a specific oil embargo during a specific geopolitical moment. It did not cause Trump’s tariffs in April 2025, nor did it raise American electricity prices by 6.7 percent year-over-year by December 2025 (U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 2026). The Beirut barracks bombing was a tragedy, but it did not add $2,120 to the average family’s annual expenses in 2025 (U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 2026). Navarro drags out these ghosts because he cannot win the argument on the current numbers. If you cannot refute the data, bury it under forty years of outrage.

Navarro’s Own Crystal Ball

Perhaps the most damning receipt is Navarro’s own writing from just three months ago. On March 13, 2026, he published a Wall Street Journal opinion piece arguing that the Iran war would “lower energy prices” because it would remove the so-called “Iran Terror Premium” from global markets (Navarro, 2026b). He claimed that reducing geopolitical risk would cause oil prices to fall. Instead, Brent crude surged past $119 per barrel by March 19, 2026, and the Strait of Hormuz closed, triggering what the International Energy Agency called the greatest global energy security challenge in history (Yahoo News, 2026). One analysis noted that Navarro’s prediction had “thus far, been exceedingly wrong” (Yahoo News, 2026). Now, in June, he has pivoted from promising cheap gas to blaming Iran for expensive gas. He was not just wrong; he is hoping you forget he ever said it.

The Actual Receipts

Navarro likes to call Democrats and journalists “useful idiots” for refusing to blame Tehran for rising prices (Navarro, 2026a). But the people waving the actual receipts are not partisan hacks. They are economists at the Federal Reserve, Harvard, Goldman Sachs, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Vox recently compiled these analyses and concluded that without Trump’s tariffs and his war of choice, American inflation would likely be more than one full percentage point lower today, putting it much closer to the Fed’s 2 percent target (Levitz, 2026). Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi warned that the higher energy prices caused by the war threaten to do even more economic damage than the tariffs, further pushing inflation higher while job growth stagnates (Angelo, 2026). The war made a bad tariff problem worse, but it did not create the problem.

Who Is the Arsonist Here?

Navarro ends his piece with a rhetorical question: Will voters blame the arsonist in Tehran or the firefighter in the White House? It is a cute line, but it requires you to believe that firefighters typically show up to the scene twelve months after setting their own house on fire. Trump promised to end inflation “on day one” and instead handed American families thousands of dollars in extra costs through tariffs before the first major bomb fell on Iran (U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, 2026). The war, which began with a U.S. and Israeli strike on February 28, 2026, during ongoing nuclear negotiations, has undoubtedly deepened the energy crisis (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). But the inflationary kindling was already stacked, doused in tariff oil, and waiting for a match.

If Peter Navarro wants to talk about 1979 so badly, he should remember one lesson from that era. Presidents who preside over manufactured energy crises and stagflation tend to see their approval ratings crater, no matter how hard they try to blame foreigners for their own policy failures. The difference today is that we have the data to prove it in real time. Show the receipts, read the dates, and Navarro’s story collapses like a house of cards.

If you'd like to watch a man argue with his own March press clippings in real time, Navarro's June retcon is here: https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5906113-iran-terror-inflation-us-confrontation/

Works Cited

Angelo, J. (2026, May 5). You had a miserable 2025 because of tariff inflation. The Iran war will be even worse, top economist says. *Fortune*. https://fortune.com/2026/05/05/iran-war-oil-prices-mark-zandi-donald-trump-tariffs/

Levitz, E. (2026, May 27). The 2026 economy could have been great, if not for Trump. *Vox*. https://www.vox.com/politics/489397/inflation-prices-iran-war-tariffs-trump

Mau, R., & Smith, T. (2026, May 5). Effects of realized tariff changes on PCE prices peaked in first quarter 2026. *Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas*. https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2026/0505-mau

Navarro, P. (2026a, June 3). Iran, not Trump, lit the inflation fuse. *The Hill*. https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5906113-iran-terror-inflation-us-confrontation/

Navarro, P. (2026b, March 13). Iran war will lower energy prices. *The Wall Street Journal* [Reposted on peternavarro.com]. https://peternavarro.com/iran-war-will-lower-energy-prices/

U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. (2026). *Trumpflation: Donald Trump’s broken promises on affordability* [Minority staff report]. https://www.banking.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/1_year_costs_report.pdf

Wikipedia contributors. (2026). *2026 Iran war*. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war

Yahoo News. (2026, March 25). The Iran war has already hurt oil production more than the ‘70s energy crisis did. https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/iran-war-already-hurt-oil-170023641.html

Russell is right about one thing. Pratt is tapping into real anger. Los Angeles has a homelessness crisis, rents are obscene, and the Pacific Palisades fire destroyed thousands of homes while the city looked unprepared. Anger is justified. But anger is not a platform, and Pratt is not offering solutions. He is offering slogans, superhero memes, and the backing of billionaires who would like the city to be a little friendlier to their portfolios.

Let Us Check the Receipts on Those Poll Numbers

Russell points to an Emerson College poll showing Pratt at 22% support, a 12-point jump since March (Russell, 2026). That part checks out. According to the Los Angeles Times, the poll of 350 likely voters put Bass at 30%, Pratt at 22%, and Nithya Raman at 20% (Goldberg, 2026). But context matters. The margin of error was 5%, meaning Pratt and Raman were statistically tied for second place. When pollsters asked undecided voters which way they leaned, Raman actually moved slightly ahead of Pratt (Goldberg, 2026). So Pratt is not surging past the field. He is bouncing around in a three-way race where half the electorate finally made up its minds.

Russell also notes that Pratt is the only Republican in the nonpartisan race. The Emerson poll found that over 61% of Republicans back Pratt, and he pulls nearly half of independents (Goldberg, 2026). In other words, his base is exactly what he claims to reject: partisan Republicans and the anti-Bass crowd. You cannot take Republican donor money, Republican voter support, and Donald Trump’s endorsement, then insist you are not running a Republican campaign. That is not independence. That is branding.

Artificial Intelligence for an Artificial Candidate

Russell describes Pratt’s AI-generated ads as clever satire. She quotes an ad where barbecue dads repeat “I’m not MAGA or anything” while complaining about needles on playgrounds and downtown decay (Russell, 2026). Whether that exact script is real or fan-made content that Pratt reposted is almost beside the point. The New York Times noted that Pratt’s campaign has gained attention specifically for its embrace of AI-generated social media videos, some of which his team calls fan-made (Sorkin et al., 2026). The effect is the same. His message is being manufactured by algorithms because his own record is too thin to stand on its own.

If Pratt’s biggest selling point is that he is not a politician, his second biggest selling point appears to be that he is not MAGA. But his own endorser disagrees. In a Deadline interview, Donald Trump called Pratt a “big MAGA person” (Patten, 2026). When the man who coined the term stamps it on your forehead, you do not get to wash it off with an AI-generated car commercial.

Jesus Christ, Superstar, and Also Obama

In a May 21 interview with CNN, Pratt said his political role model is Jesus Christ, whom he called a politician because “he had to go in and speak” (”MAGA Star Candidate Reveals Surprising Political Role Model,” 2026). When asked if he admired any modern politicians, Pratt said no. He explained, “No, I’m not a politician. I don’t want to be a politician. I want to be a fighter for the people” (”MAGA Star Candidate Reveals Surprising Political Role Model,” 2026). He also claimed he is “most similar to Obama.”

Let us unpack that. Pratt wants to be a fighter for the people, but his role model is a first-century religious leader, and his policy twin is a former Democratic president he probably voted against. Meanwhile, he became a Republican because law enforcement told him to get a concealed carry permit after he received death threats during his MTV years, and only Republicans would help him (”MAGA Star Candidate Reveals Surprising Political Role Model,” 2026). That is not a political philosophy. That is a celebrity memoir.

Follow the Billionaire Money

Russell mentions that Pratt has attracted Hollywood heavyweights like Lucian Grainge, Dan Loeb, Haim Saban, and the Winklevoss twins (Russell, 2026). The New York Times confirmed the list and added several more, including Bobby Kotick, Sean Rad, and Jeanie Buss (Sorkin et al., 2026). These are not small donors dropping twenty bucks because they like Pratt’s energy. They are billionaires and corporate CEOs.

According to the same Times report, Pratt’s message of “reducing bureaucracy and making the city friendlier to companies” is what drew them in (Sorkin et al., 2026). So the frustrated suburban dad in Pratt’s AI ad might think he is voting for cleaner parks, but the people paying for the ads want deregulation and lower taxes. That is how populism works in America. The donors write the checks, and the voters get the memes.

If It Walks Like a MAGA and Talks Like a MAGA

Russell insists Pratt is not running on ideology, just frustration. But frustration without ideology still has consequences. Pratt wants LAPD officers stationed in front of every school (”MAGA Star Candidate Reveals Surprising Political Role Model,” 2026). He wants concealed carry permits for celebrities who feel threatened. He has Trump’s endorsement and Republican voter registration. He is a Republican candidate funded by Republican donors in a nonpartisan race that he is trying to make partisan.

The fact that Pratt has to keep saying “I’m not MAGA” is telling. When Bass responded to Trump’s endorsement, she told Deadline that Los Angeles does not want a MAGA mayor (Patten, 2026). Russell frames this as Bass calling Pratt a MAGA mayor, but the truth is simpler. Trump called Pratt MAGA. Pratt’s voters are Republicans. His donors want business-friendly deregulation. If that is not MAGA, it is at least MAGA-adjacent, and Los Angeles deserves better than a candidate whose main pitch is that he is technically not the worst thing he looks like.

LA’s problems are fixable, but they require boring things. It needs zoning reform, infrastructure investment, and mental health services. It needs permitting reform that actually helps working people build housing, not just helps billionaires build studios faster. Pratt is not offering any of that. He is offering vibes, guns, and AI videos. The city is frustrated, but frustration is not a credential. If Los Angeles wanted another reality star in charge, it would just hand the remote to the producers who already run everything.

If you want to see a columnist from Texas explain why a Trump-endorsed, billionaire-funded Republican reality star is actually an everyman outsider, you can read the original magic show here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/24/spencer-pratt-la-mayor-party-voter-concerns/90195170007/

Works Cited

Goldberg, N. (2026, May 13). Karen Bass, Xavier Becerra top new poll for L.A. mayor, California governor. *Los Angeles Times*. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-13/bass-holds-lead-in-new-la-mayoral-poll-with-pratt-raman-neck-neck-for-runoff-position

MAGA star candidate reveals surprising political role model. (2026, May 21). *The Daily Beast*. https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-star-candidate-spencer-pratt-reveals-surprising-political-role-model-jesus-christ/

Patten, D. (2026, May 21). Battle for L.A.: Incumbent Karen Bass on Trump backing Pratt for mayor, LAPD control, ParaBros deal & protecting Hollywood jobs for Angelenos. *Deadline*. https://deadline.com/2026/05/karen-bass-interview-spencer-pratt-trump-1236917033/

Russell, N. (2026, May 24). Spencer Pratt isn’t running on MAGA. He’s running on frustration. *USA Today*. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/24/spencer-pratt-la-mayor-party-voter-concerns/90195170007/

Sorkin, A. R., Warner, B., Kessler, S., de la Merced, M. J., Gallogly, N., & O’Keefe, B. (2026, May 14). Dan Loeb, Bobby Kotick and other business leaders backing Spencer Pratt. *The New York Times*. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/14/business/dealbook/spencer-pratt-ceo-support.html

Michael J. New (2026) at National Review wants readers to believe that abortion bans are basically harmless. He took one look at a recent study about miscarriage care, waved some numbers around like a magician hiding a rabbit, and declared victory for the pro-life movement. The problem is that his argument falls apart the moment anyone actually checks the sources he claims to have read.

The Texas Timeline He Gets Wrong

New brags that the Texas Heartbeat Act took effect in September 2021, ten months before Dobbs, as if this proves some kind of point about timelines. He is right about the date, but he conveniently ignores that the law was immediately blocked by a federal judge, which prevented consistent enforcement during the period he pretends to analyze (Surana, 2023). Even more importantly, Texas had the earliest and most restrictive ban, and Texas also saw the worst outcomes. Federal investigators found that hospitals in Texas and another state denied abortion care to miscarrying patients in ways that broke federal law (Surana, 2023). One pregnant woman in Texas died after doctors delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours because they were terrified of the state’s abortion ban. Those cases are not outliers. They are exactly what happens when politicians write medical statutes.

Comparing Apples and Miscarriages

New starts with a study from the American Journal of Public Health that looked at insurance claims for over 123,000 miscarriages. He notes that in states with abortion bans, more women miscarried without any medical intervention after Dobbs. In his telling, this is no big deal because plenty of miscarriages resolve on their own. He points out that the percentages went from 73.2 percent to 76.7 percent in ban states and from 69.7 percent to 70.4 percent in permissive states and calls the difference marginal (New, 2026).

Here is what he leaves out. A miscarriage that resolves naturally at home is not the issue. The issue is a miscarriage that requires medical intervention and does not get it. When a pregnant person is bleeding out or septic and doctors are terrified to act because state law treats them like criminals, that is the crisis. New distracts readers with statistics about naturally resolving pregnancies so they will not ask about the women who show up at emergency rooms and are turned away.

Infant Mortality by the Numbers

New claims infant mortality in the United States has declined since the fourth quarter of 2022. He gives no numbers, just a vague trendline. The actual CDC data show that infant mortality rose in 2022 for the first time in twenty years, climbing from 5.44 deaths per 1,000 live births to 5.61 (Hagen, 2023). The rate stayed flat at 5.61 in 2023 (Murphy et al., 2024). So when New says it declined since late 2022, he is either cherry-picking quarterly fluctuations or hoping readers will not look it up.

Meanwhile, a study published in JAMA found that states with abortion bans had 5.6 percent higher infant mortality than expected, resulting in an estimated 478 additional infant deaths (Gemmill et al., 2025). Texas accounted for 384 of those excess deaths because its ban started earliest. Black infants in ban states died at a rate 11 percent higher than expected. Those are not trends. Those are babies.

The Maternal Mortality Shell Game

New claims maternal mortality dropped over 25 percent since 2022 according to the CDC. The actual CDC data show the maternal mortality rate was 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2023), 18.6 in 2023, and 17.9 in 2024 (Tsai, 2026). That is roughly a 20 percent decline from 2022 to 2024, not over 25 percent. Even if readers grant him the direction, he is ignoring the baseline reality.

The Commonwealth Fund found that in 2020, maternal death rates in abortion-restriction states were 62 percent higher than in abortion-access states, 28.8 versus 17.8 deaths per 100,000 births (Commonwealth Fund, 2022). Tulane researchers found that states with more abortion restrictions had a 7 percent increase in total maternal mortality (Vilda et al., 2021). And Johns Hopkins researchers found a possible 9.2 percent increase in pregnancy-associated deaths in ban states (Bell et al., 2026).

New mentions two studies that found no statistically significant difference in maternal mortality trends. He does not tell readers that those studies looked at the narrowest possible definition of maternal mortality. That definition covers only deaths within 42 days from obstetric causes, which is so rare that detecting a change is statistically difficult. It is like claiming a factory is safe because regulators cannot prove it caused one specific rare cancer, while ignoring the overall body count. Meanwhile, broader measures of deaths during and after pregnancy show clear harm.

Stop Pretending Bad Policy Is Good Medicine

At the end of the day, New’s article is not an argument. It is a sedative. He grabs unrelated correlations, dangles trendlines without actual numbers, and hides the fact that conservative states with abortion bans already had worse maternal and infant health outcomes before Dobbs and have continued to have worse outcomes after. The data are clear. Abortion bans correlate with more infant deaths, higher baseline maternal mortality, and documented cases of delayed emergency care. Readers do not need a doctorate in biostatistics to see it. They just need to read past the headline.

If your brain needs a vacation from logic and your soul craves sentences that evaporate on contact with oxygen, treat yourself to the original here: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-strong-pro-life-laws-have-not-worsened-miscarriage-care/

Work Cited

Bell, S. O., Franks, A. M., Ozinsky, A., Anjur-Dietrich, S., Margerison, C. E., Stuart, E. A., Feller, A., & Gemmill, A. (2026). Abortion bans and maternal, pregnancy-related, and pregnancy-associated mortality in 14 US States, 2016-2023: Estimated impacts amid substantial measurement challenges. *American Journal of Public Health*. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2026.308465

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). *Maternal mortality rates in the United States, 2022* (Health E-Stats). https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/maternal-mortality/2022/maternal-mortality-rates-2022.pdf

Commonwealth Fund. (2022, December). *U.S. maternal health divide: Limited services and worse outcomes* (Issue Brief). https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2022/dec/us-maternal-health-divide-limited-services-worse-outcomes

Gemmill, A., Franks, A., Anjur-Dietrich, S., Ozinsky, A., Arbour, D., Stuart, E., Ben-Michael, E., Feller, A., & Bell, S. (2025). US abortion bans and infant mortality. *JAMA*. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2830298

Hagen, C. (2023, November 1). Infant mortality rate sees first rise in 20 years. NCHS Blogs. https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2023/11/01/7479/

Murphy, S. L., Kochanek, K. D., Xu, J. Q., & Arias, E. (2024). *Mortality in the United States, 2023* (NCHS Data Brief No. 521). National Center for Health Statistics. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK611296/

New, M. J. (2026, May 20). No, strong pro-life laws have not worsened miscarriage care. *National Review*. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-strong-pro-life-laws-have-not-worsened-miscarriage-care/

Surana, K. (2023, May 19). Hospitals in two states denied an abortion to a miscarrying patient. *ProPublica*. https://www.propublica.org/article/two-hospitals-denied-abortion-miscarrying-patient-breaking-federal-law

Tsai, B. (2026, March 4). NCHS releases final 2024 maternal mortality data. NCHS Blogs. https://blogs.cdc.gov/nchs/2026/03/04/7885/

Vilda, D., Wallace, M., Daniel, C., Goldin Evans, M., Stoecker, C., & Theall, K. (2021). State abortion policies and maternal death in the United States, 2015-2018. *American Journal of Public Health*, *111*(11), 2027-2036. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306396

Forty-Six Percent Is A Lie, And So Is The Rest

Swarens claims Colbert insulted “the 46% of Americans who identify as Republicans.” That number does not exist in any reputable poll. According to a 2025 Gallup survey reported by Fox News, 27% of American adults identify as Republicans (Sorace, 2026). Not 46%. Another 15% of independents lean Republican, which brings the total Republican-leaning population to roughly 42%. Swarens took the GOP-leaning number, rounded it up, and stripped away the leaners so he could pretend half the country carries a party card. That is not analysis. It is padding.

If we look at registered voters specifically, the gap gets worse. USAFacts reported in April 2026 that there are 39.2 million registered Republicans out of a voting-age population that the Census Bureau estimated at roughly 262 million in 2023 (USAFacts, 2026; U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). That means actual registered Republicans make up about 15% of eligible voters. Swarens inflated that to 46% because it helps him feel like a persecuted majority. The receipts say otherwise.

Johnny Carson Had Three Channels; Stephen Colbert Has Three Hundred

Swarens compares Colbert’s 2.5 million viewers to Johnny Carson’s 9 million and calls it failure. This is like comparing a horse-drawn carriage to a sports car and blaming the car for not producing as much manure. When Carson ruled late night, American television had three commercial broadcast networks. The Big Three captured more than 90% of the audience through the 1970s (EBSCO Research, n.d.). By the early 1990s, cable and VCRs had already eroded that share to 61%. Today, Nielsen reports that streaming alone makes up 44.8% of all television usage, surpassing broadcast and cable combined (Nielsen, 2025). Viewers can choose from Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, cable news, podcasts, and hundreds of other options. Colbert is not drawing Carson’s numbers because no one draws Carson’s numbers. The platform has fragmented. That is not arrogance. That is arithmetic.

Swarens also notes that David Letterman pulled 7.8 million viewers in 1993. He leaves out the part where Letterman arrived before Fox News, before streaming, before smartphones, and when broadcast still dominated. Using 1993 ratings to judge a 2026 show is either deliberate deception or historical illiteracy.

First Place Is A Weird Spot To Call Failure

According to Nielsen data reported by LateNighter in April 2026, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert remained the most-watched program at 11:35 p.m. in the first quarter of 2026, averaging 2.70 million viewers (Rosenzweig, 2026). He beat Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon comfortably. CBS did not fire a loser. CBS canceled a winner. The network explicitly stated the decision was financial, not performance-related. Industry reporting indicates the show lost roughly $40 million annually. But that loss is not unique to Colbert. Late-night advertising revenue across the Big Three networks collapsed from $439 million in 2018 to about $220 million in 2024, per data from the ad firm Guideline cited by the Quinnipiac Chronicle (Angelillo, 2025). That is a 50% drop across the board. The entire format is bleeding money because the ad model broke, not because Stephen Colbert made fun of a politician.

Swarens wants you to believe that Colbert’s “spite-the-right attitude” cost him his job. The truth is simpler. Corporate executives looked at a spreadsheet, saw that broadcast late night no longer pays for itself, and cut the show. It is happening everywhere. James Corden’s Late Late Show was already axed. After Midnight ended in 2025. The 12:37 a.m. slot is dead. This is an industry-wide autopsy, not a personal vendetta.

The Real Echo Chamber Wears A Suit, Not A Monologue

Swarens calls Colbert an echo chamber, but the actual echo chamber is the one being built at CBS headquarters. In July 2025, Paramount Global paid $16 million to settle a lawsuit from President Trump over a 60 Minutes interview. The company needed Federal Communications Commission approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance, and Trump-appointed regulators had made clear that the deal could stall unless Paramount played ball. After the settlement, Paramount agreed to appoint a so-called bias monitor and installed conservative commentator Bari Weiss to help steer news coverage (Fallow, 2025).

By early 2026, veteran CBS producers were leaving with blistering farewell memos. Mary Walsh, a 46-year CBS News veteran, wrote that staff had been told to “aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum” (Barr, 2026). Producer Alicia Hastey warned that stories were being evaluated not on journalistic merit but on whether they matched “a shifting set of ideological expectations.” These are not the complaints of snowflakes. They are the complaints of journalists watching their employer bend the knee to a presidential administration.

CBS did not cancel Colbert because he insulted conservatives. CBS canceled Colbert because his corporate parent needed to keep a president happy, and a high-priced comedian who criticizes power was no longer politically convenient. That is how power works. Swarens should recognize it, but he is too busy pretending that a first-place show finished last.

Stephen Colbert is off the air because Paramount calculated that pleasing Donald Trump was more valuable than keeping its highest-rated late-night host. Swarens celebrates the decision as a market verdict, but the market had already spoken, and it chose Colbert. The only verdict here is political. If Swarens finds joy in that, he is welcome to it. He should just stop calling it math.

If you want to see what happens when a former editor discovers that broadcast television now has to compete with more than three channels and immediately blames a liberal for it, the original masterpiece is here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/21/stephen-colbert-final-show-cbs-conservatives-happy/90179206007/

EDIT: I reworded my pointer to this clowns original article.

Works Cited

Angelillo, A. (2025, September 30). The slow, silent collapse of late night TV is impossible to ignore. The Quinnipiac Chronicle. https://quchronicle.com/90640/arts-and-life/the-slow-silent-collapse-of-late-night-tv-is-impossible-to-ignore/

Barr, J. (2026, February 27). Departing CBS News producer claims political bias as Paramount poised to buy Warner Bros. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/27/cbs-news-political-bias-paramount-warner-bros

Craig, M. (2025, September 12). The highest-paid TV hosts of 2025. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattcraig/2025/09/12/the-highest-paid-tv-hosts-of-2025/

EBSCO Research. (n.d.). Decline of the Big Three networks. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/decline-big-three-networks

Fallow, K. (2025, July 9). Paramount’s Trump lawsuit settlement: Curtain call for the First Amendment? Knight First Amendment Institute. https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/paramounts-trump-lawsuit-settlement-curtain-call-for-the-first-amendment

Nielsen. (2025, June 17). Streaming reaches historic TV milestone, eclipses combined broadcast and cable viewing for first time. https://www.nielsen.com/news-center/2025/streaming-reaches-historic-tv-milestone-eclipses-combined-broadcast-and-cable-viewing-for-first-time/

Rosenzweig, J. (2026, April 13). Here are final late night ratings for Q1 2026. LateNighter. https://latenighter.com/news/ratings/here-are-final-late-night-ratings-for-q1-2026/

Sorace, S. (2026, January 12). Gallup survey shows record 45% of Americans identify as independents. Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/record-number-americans-identify-political-independents-rejecting-2-major-parties-poll-finds

Swarens, T. (2026, May 21). Colbert’s final ‘Late Show’ brings conservatives joy. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/21/stephen-colbert-final-show-cbs-conservatives-happy/90179206007/

U.S. Census Bureau. (2024, March 29). Estimates of the voting-age population for 2023. Federal Register. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06666/estimates-of-the-voting-age-population-for-2023

USAFacts. (2026, April). How many voters have a party affiliation? https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-voters-have-a-party-affiliation/

Math Does Not Care About Political Spin

First, let us look at the math, because math does not care about political spin. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the federal deficit for fiscal year 2025 totaled $1.8 trillion. That is the amount the government borrows in a single year. Meanwhile, the total national debt, which is the accumulation of all that borrowing over decades, surged past $36 trillion back in late 2024 and has been climbing ever since (Congressional Budget Office, 2025; Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, 2024). So when the authors suggest piling a new gas subsidy on top of the war bill, they are not proposing relief. They are proposing to use a credit card to pay for a war, and then using a second credit card to buy stickers that say everything is fine.

Our Spies Said Relax, We Bombed Anyway

Then there is the small matter of why we are in this war at all. The official story is that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat that had to be stopped immediately. The problem is that America’s own spies already looked at the evidence and came to a different conclusion. On March 25, 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified before lawmakers that the intelligence community continues to assess Iran had not made a decision to build a nuclear weapon (C-SPAN, 2025). That is not a footnote. That is the top intelligence official in the country telling Congress under oath that the justification for a shooting war was shaky at best. A war of necessity is one thing. A war of choice based on intelligence the administration itself ignored is something else entirely. Offering taxpayers a gas rebate for a war we did not need to start adds insult to injury, then charges interest on both.

Funny How That Timing Works

Now let us talk about timing, because timing is rarely accidental in Washington. Over a year ago, Representative Dan Goldman sent a formal letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding the full release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, accusing the Department of Justice of deliberately sitting on documents that could implicate powerful people (Denver Gazette, 2025). Those files are still being dribbled out today, and now, in May 2026, The Hill publishes an op-ed asking for wartime gas subsidies. Maybe it is pure coincidence. Maybe it is pure hubris. Or maybe when the public starts asking uncomfortable questions about who visited which island, a nice loud war with a coupon attached makes for excellent background noise. I am not saying there is a secret master plan scrawled on a napkin somewhere. I am saying that if you want Americans to stop looking at one scandal, handing them a subsidy check while bombs fall is a pretty reliable way to grab the remote control.

The Receipts Say We Are Broke

A gasoline rebate is not a solution. It is a bribe paid with your own borrowed money. If policymakers actually cared about the pressure on households, they would stop the war that is causing the price spike instead of borrowing billions to break your legs and then selling you crutches at a markup. Americans do not need another temporary subsidy that permanent politicians can tout on cable news. They need honesty, accountability, and leaders who do not treat the national credit card like a toy. Show me the receipts, and the receipts say we cannot afford this war, let alone a rebate to celebrate it.

If you believed Dace Potas had cornered the market on getting paid to write spectacular nonsense, Eisner and Rosen are here to prove the supply of terrible ideas is truly limitless. Marvel at their budgetary atrocity here: https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/economy-budget/5874351-temporary-gasoline-subsidy-iran/

Works Cited

Congressional Budget Office. (2025). Monthly budget review: Summary for fiscal year 2025. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61307

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. (2024). Gross national debt reaches $36 trillion. https://www.crfb.org/press-releases/gross-national-debt-reaches-36-trillion

C-SPAN. (2025, March 25). User clip: Tulsi Gabbard: Iran is not building a nuclear weapon. https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-committee/user-clip-tulsi-gabbard-iran-is-not-building-a-nuclear-weapon/5166205

Denver Gazette. (2025, May 12). Goldman accuses Bondi of preventing release of Epstein files, demands documents. https://www.denvergazette.com/2025/05/12/goldman-accuses-bondi-of-preventing-release-of-epstein-files-demands-documents/

Eisner, D. F., & Rosen, M. (2026, May 13). A wartime gasoline rebate that strengthens America’s hand. The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/economy-budget/5874351-temporary-gasoline-subsidy-iran/

Polishing the Turd

Here is what actually happened in Louisiana v. Callais. The Supreme Court did not simply strike down racial gerrymandering. By a 6 to 3 vote, the conservative majority gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the law that has protected minority voters for over half a century (Howe, 2026). Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Louisiana had no compelling interest to create a second majority-Black district, even though Black voters make up roughly one third of the state. Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, said the majority did not update the law but destroyed it, rendering the provision what she called “all but a dead letter” (Howe, 2026). When Potas describes this as merely rejecting race-based districting, he is polishing a decision that opens the door for states to erase majority-minority seats across the South. That is not mainstream legal housekeeping. That is a demolition.

The Graham Platner Straw Man

Potas then cites Graham Platner, a Maine Senate candidate, as proof that Democrats are eager to stack the court. What he leaves out is that Platner is a fringe candidate who has apologized for inflammatory online rhetoric and currently trails Republican Senator Susan Collins by nineteen points according to polling reported by the Washington Free Beacon (Costescu, 2025). Using Platner to represent the Democratic Party is like using a flare gun to represent indoor lighting. It is dishonest framing, and it ignores that establishment Democrats have been far more cautious than their own base wants.

Republicans Already Packed the Court, They Just Stole the Seats Instead

The base has reason to be impatient. Republicans already packed the court. They just did it through procedural theft instead of legislation. In 2016, Senate Republicans blocked Merrick Garland for nearly a year, claiming voters should have a say. Four years later, they rammed through Amy Coney Barrett in about a month before voters could remove Donald Trump. The seat count never changed, but the ideological balance was manipulated through bad-faith timing. If that is not court packing, it is at least court hijacking, and it worked. The result is a 6 to 3 supermajority that overturned abortion rights, kneecapped environmental regulations, and now weakened voting rights protections.

The “Both Sides” Trap for Suckers

Potas warns that if one party expands the court, the other will retaliate. That is not a warning. That is the current reality. Republicans have shown they will use every lever available, from stealing seats to empowering justices who accept undisclosed luxury vacations from GOP megadonors. Democrats unilaterally disarming does not preserve institutional credibility. It guarantees minority rule. When Potas says expanding the court would destroy credibility, he is asking the side that got robbed to protect the burglar’s reputation.

He also claims court expansion has no basis in principle and is only about power. Everything in government is about power. The Constitution gives Congress the authority to set the size of the Supreme Court, and Congress has exercised that power six times in American history before settling on nine in 1869 (Supreme Court of the United States, n.d.). The Judiciary Act of 2023, which Potas references, would add four seats to match the thirteen federal appellate courts. That is not a radical coup. It is a restoration of proportionality that reflects the modern judiciary (Schonfeld, 2023).

Stop Bringing a Rulebook to a Knife Fight

The audience Potas seems to be addressing is an imaginary moderate who believes both sides are equally naughty. That is not the country we live in. One party is trying to win elections with popular majorities. The other is relying on a court that approves partisan gerrymanders and strikes down voting rights enforcement. Democrats are not the other party anymore. They are the opposition to minority rule. When Mehdi Hasan says the GOP-packed court is the biggest block on progress in this country, he is stating a measurable fact (Hasan, 2026). When Rashida Tlaib demands Congress expand the court immediately, she is responding to a decision that takes away voting power from the same communities the Voting Rights Act was meant to protect (Tlaib, 2026).

Potas ends by telling establishment Democrats they would be wise to avoid embracing such recklessness. He has it backward. Wisdom, in this political environment, means recognizing that institutional norms only survive when both sides respect them. Once one side smashes the norms and captures the referee, asking the other side to keep playing by the old rules is not wisdom. It is surrender dressed up as principle. If Democrats regain power and refuse to rebalance the court, they are not preserving democracy. They are allowing a captured judiciary to veto it.

If you'd like to see what happens when a concern troll discovers the thesaurus function, Potas's manifesto for polite surrender is here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/12/democrat-calls-pack-supreme-court-dangerous/90025431007/

Works Cited

Costescu, J. (2025, November 16). Graham Platner calls to stack the Supreme Court and impeach ‘at least two’ sitting justices. Washington Free Beacon. https://freebeacon.com/democrats/graham-platner-calls-to-stack-the-supreme-court-and-impeach-at-least-two-sitting-justices/

Hasan, M. [@mehdirhasan]. (2026, April 29). If the Democrats don’t make rebalancing and expanding the Supreme Court a top priority [Post]. X.

Howe, A. (2026, April 29). In major Voting Rights Act case, Supreme Court strikes down redistricting map challenged as racially discriminatory. SCOTUS blog. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/04/in-major-voting-rights-act-case-supreme-court-strikes-down-redistricting-map-challenged-as-racia/

Potas, D. (2026, May 12). Democrats still won’t let court packing go. It’s a bad idea. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/12/democrat-calls-pack-supreme-court-dangerous/90025431007/

Schonfeld, Z. (2023, May 16). Democrats reintroduce Supreme Court expansion legislation. The Hill. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4006799-democrats-reintroduce-supreme-court-expansion-legislation/

Supreme Court of the United States. (n.d.). The court as an institution. https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/institution.aspx

Tlaib, R. (2026, April 29). Tlaib statement on Supreme Court gutting Voting Rights Act. U.S. House of Representatives. https://tlaib.house.gov/posts/tlaib-statement-on-supreme-court-gutting-voting-rights-act

Where Are the Receipts?

Potas wants you to believe that Democrats “blocked” the JetBlue merger and “left the airline stranded in financial limbo” until fuel prices killed it. He even claims, with no evidence whatsoever, that Democrats opposed the merger because they “feared it might actually work.” That is a mind-reading fallacy. He cannot see into the heads of senators, and he does not bother to prove it. He just asserts it and hopes you nod along. If you are going to write about corporate failure, show your math. Potas never does.

The Judge Who Actually Killed the Deal

Here is what actually happened. The Department of Justice sued to block the JetBlue-Spirit merger because its antitrust lawyers believed the deal would hurt consumers. That is what the DOJ is legally required to do when it thinks consolidation will raise prices. Then a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan reviewed the evidence and ruled the deal illegal (Houlis, 2026). So the person who ultimately blocked the merger was not Elizabeth Warren, not Joe Biden, and not some progressive bogeyman. It was a Reagan-appointed judge exercising independent judicial review. Potas leaves that out because it wrecks his narrative.

JetBlue Was Not a Rescue Boat

Potas treats the merger as if it were a guaranteed lifeline for a drowning company. It was not. The deal was a $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit by JetBlue, another airline that was already struggling. Potas quietly admits in his own column that “JetBlue itself may not have ultimately been in the financial position to absorb Spirit’s mounting debts.” That is a massive concession. If the buyer was too weak to save the target, then blocking the merger did not seal Spirit’s fate. The airline’s own broken business model did.

Spirit had filed for bankruptcy twice since 2024 (Rose, 2026). It had lost its cost advantage because the big legacy carriers copied its ultra-low-cost playbook. Its own workers, represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, blamed “corporate mismanagement and poor financial stewardship” for the shutdown (BBC News, 2026). Those are ramp workers and mechanics watching executives steer the plane into the ground. They are not Democratic senators.

The Trump Bailout That Bounced

The most dishonest part of Potas’s argument is the timeline. He acts as if Democrats had the power to save Spirit this year and chose not to. The truth is the exact opposite. The Trump administration spent weeks trying to bail out Spirit with $500 million in taxpayer financing in exchange for 90% equity. The deal collapsed because of opposition from Trump’s own advisers, Republicans in Congress, and Trump’s own Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, who called it “good money after bad” (Reuters, 2026). Duffy also noted that nobody in the private market wanted to buy Spirit, asking, “If no one else wants to buy them, why would we buy them?” (Reuters, 2026). The party that currently holds the White House had the pen in hand and could not close the deal. Blaming Democrats for a merger blocked two years earlier, while ignoring the Republican administration that just let the airline die last week, is pure deflection.

Follow the Fuel

The final blow was not a 2024 court ruling. It was the Iran war and the fuel shock that followed. Spirit’s bankruptcy plan assumed jet fuel would cost about $2.24 a gallon in 2026. By late April 2026, prices had doubled to roughly $4.51 a gallon, demolishing the company’s math overnight (Reuters, 2026). Jet fuel accounts for about a quarter of airline operating expenses, and Potas himself acknowledges that the war “helped trigger the spike in jet fuel prices.” Even Secretary Duffy admitted that Spirit was in “dire straits long before the war with Iran” and that “their model wasn’t working” (BBC News, 2026). When the Trump administration, the free market, and the Reagan-appointed judiciary all agree that the company was a corpse, maybe it is time to stop pretending that Democrats killed it.

Potas also misrepresents antitrust law. He claims progressives oppose consolidation “regardless of whether that consolidation may actually strengthen competition.” But the DOJ and the judge found that this specific merger would likely reduce competition and raise fares. That is not ideology. That is the law doing exactly what it is supposed to do. You can disagree with the ruling, but calling it “ideological” without engaging the actual legal standard is just name-calling.

The honest summary is simple. Spirit Airlines failed because its business model stopped working, its executives could not fix it, and an external fuel shock wiped out an already broken balance sheet. A merger with another struggling airline might have delayed the inevitable, or it might have created a larger, still-failing carrier with more debt. We do not know, and neither does Potas. What we do know is that the administration currently in power tried to write a $500 million taxpayer check and could not get it done. If you want to blame a political party for the corpse on the floor, look at the one that had the power to resuscitate it last week and walked away.

If you want to see what happens when a political science degree argues economics by burning strawmen for kindling, read Dace Potas's original slop here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/07/spirit-airlines-collapse-democrats-block-jetblue-merger/89948205007/

EDIT: I made a typo and referred to Spirit as Sprint so I corrected it.

Works Cited

BBC News. (2026, May 2). *Spirit Airlines shutting down after rescue talks collapse*. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqxlnrqjvzyo

Houlis, A. (2026, May 2). *Elizabeth Warren hailed blocking the $3.8B Spirit-JetBlue merger as a ‘Biden win for flyers.’ Now Spirit is gone*. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/elizabeth-warren-hailed-blocking-3-214500430.html

Potas, D. (2026, May 7). *Blame Spirit’s downfall on Democrats, not just fuel prices*. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/07/spirit-airlines-collapse-democrats-block-jetblue-merger/89948205007/

Reuters. (2026, May 1). *Spirit Airlines shuts down, industry’s first Iran war casualty*. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/spirit-airlines-prepares-cease-operations-after-rescue-deal-stalls-wsj-reports-2026-05-01/

Rose, J. (2026, May 2). *Spirit Airlines ceases operations after escalating financial struggles*. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/02/nx-s1-5807933/spirit-airlines-ceases-operations-folds

The Receipts: What Actually Happened in Louisiana

Here is what actually happened. After the 2020 census, Louisiana drew a congressional map with only one majority-Black district out of six, even though roughly one-third of the state’s population is African American. A federal court found that map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars election practices that result in minority voters having less opportunity than others to elect representatives of their choice. Ordered to fix the problem, the legislature created a second majority-Black district in 2024. Then a group of voters who described themselves as non-African American sued, claiming the new district was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court agreed in a 6-3 decision and struck down the district (Howe, 2026).

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Republican-appointed majority, ruled that because Section 2 did not actually require Louisiana to create a second majority-Black district, the state had no compelling interest to use race in drawing the map. To prove a violation of Section 2 now, he wrote, plaintiffs must “disentangle race from politics” and show that race, rather than partisan goals, “drove a district’s lines” (Kagan, 2026). Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented. She pointed out that Congress explicitly rejected this exact standard more than forty years ago. In 1980, the Court’s decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden required proof of racist intent to win a vote-dilution case. Congress amended Section 2 in 1982 to overturn that decision because lawmakers knew states would always have a “non-racial rationalization” handy, and requiring proof of intent would kill legitimate claims (Kagan, 2026). By bringing that dead standard back to life, Kagan argued, the majority did not “update” the law. It gutted it.

When Your Partisan Map Just Happens to Erase Black Voters

Potas claims this is all nonpartisan housekeeping. He is wrong, and the math is simple. In much of the country, especially the South, race and party preference are tightly linked. Black voters overwhelmingly support Democrats, and white voters overwhelmingly support Republicans. Justice Alito himself acknowledged this fact in his opinion (Howe, 2026). That means a legislature that wants to hurt Black voters can usually do so by hurting Democrats, then pointing to the partisan label as a shield. The Native American Rights Fund, along with a coalition of civil rights groups, made this exact point in a 2023 brief in another redistricting case. They explained that party and race have long served as proxies for each other, and that state legislatures draw maps that racially gerrymander voters of color while claiming they are only sorting by political affiliation (Native American Rights Fund, 2023). The Supreme Court had previously recognized that this tactic is unconstitutional. Callais changes the rules so the tactic now wins.

Potas also says Democrats are just as guilty of gerrymandering as Republicans. Even if that were true, it misses the point. The question is not which party misbehaves more. The question is whether a map can simultaneously serve a partisan goal and produce a racially discriminatory result. Callais gives state lawmakers a straightforward recipe to dilute Black voting power. Step one is to announce that your goal is partisan. Step two is to point out that the minority community you are cracking or packing votes for the other party. Step three is to watch the federal courts fold their hands because the plaintiffs cannot prove race was the sole driver. As Justice Kagan noted, assuming a state leaves behind no smoking-gun evidence of a race-based motive, Section 2 will now play no role (Kagan, 2026). That is not a neutral rule. It is a cheat code for states where racial polarization is highest, and those states are predominantly in the South with Republican-controlled legislatures.

The Geography of Convenient Timing

There is nothing nonpartisan about the timing or the effect. The decision arrived in late April, two months earlier than the Court’s most contentious rulings usually appear, giving Republican state legislatures extra time to redraw maps before the 2026 elections (Millhiser, 2026). Within days, Alabama and other states were positioned to eliminate majority-Black districts they had previously been ordered to draw. If the ruling were truly just about abstract constitutional boundaries, it would not function as a practical gift to one party. But it does, because under the new test, a state can defend against a racial vote-dilution claim simply by proving its map also benefits the ruling party. The most racially polarized states now enjoy the highest level of immunity from lawsuits challenging their maps. That is not an accident of scheduling. That is the sound of a starting gun.

Congress Already Fixed This. The Court Unfixed It.

Potas ends by saying only Congress can stop partisan map wars. That is a convenient escape hatch. Congress already addressed this problem. It did so in 1982 when it amended the Voting Rights Act to bar election practices that result in racial discrimination no matter what excuse a state legislature offers. The Senate Report accompanying that amendment specifically warned that even when state actors had purposefully discriminated, they would be able to offer a non-racial rationalization supported by official resolutions and legislative history that denied any racial motive. Congress deliberately chose to stop that evasion by making the law turn on what actually happens to minority voters, not on what legislators claim they were thinking (Kagan, 2026). That was Congress’s answer to the very problem Potas now pretends Congress never solved. When a legislature cracks a Black neighborhood into pieces because those voters support the other party, the injury is racial vote dilution dressed in partisan clothing. The Voting Rights Act’s results test was designed to catch exactly that maneuver. By requiring plaintiffs to prove that race rather than politics was the predominant motive, the Callais majority did not protect constitutional boundaries. It protected a partisan weapon. It made a mockery of the law Congress crafted specifically to stop states from using partisanship as a legal shield for racial discrimination.

Telling voters to wait for a gridlocked Congress while their districts are dismantled is not a solution. It is an excuse. The Constitution and the Voting Rights Act exist to protect real people, not to protect abstract categories. When a Black neighborhood is split into six pieces so its residents can never elect a candidate who represents them, the harm is the same whether the legislator used a red pen or a blue pen to draw the line. Dace Potas asks us to pretend we cannot see both motives at once. The evidence says we must.

To watch a columnist prove that racism and partisanship are mutually exclusive while standing on a district map that does both, the original performance is here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/05/supreme-court-ruling-partisan-redistricting-us-elections/89925187007/

Works Cited

Howe, A. (2026, April 29). In major Voting Rights Act case, Supreme Court strikes down redistricting map challenged as racially discriminatory. SCOTUS blog. https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/04/in-major-voting-rights-act-case-supreme-court-strikes-down-redistricting-map-challenged-as-racia/

Kagan, E. (2026, April 29). Dissenting opinion. In Louisiana v. Callais, Nos. 24-109 and 24-110. Supreme Court of the United States. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/24-109_2026-04-29

Millhiser, I. (2026, April 29). The Voting Rights Act is all but dead. Prepare for maximum gerrymandering. Vox. https://www.vox.com/politics/487363/supreme-court-louisiana-callais-gerrymandering-alito-voting-rights-act

Native American Rights Fund. (2023, October 10). Partisan aims cannot excuse racial gerrymandering. https://narf.org/partisan-aims-cannot-excuse-racial-gerrymandering/

Potas, D. (2026, May 5). Republicans’ redistricting push is partisan, not race-based. USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/05/supreme-court-ruling-partisan-redistricting-us-elections/89925187007/

”He Read Bluesky, Probably” and Other Evidence-Free Assertions

Let us look at what we actually know. According to CBS News (2026), Allen sent a manifesto to his family before the attack in which he planned to target administration officials from highest rank to lowest, spared FBI Director Kash Patel for reasons unknown, and criticized Secret Service security at the hotel. His sister told investigators that he often used radical rhetoric and talked about doing something to fix perceived problems in society (CBS News, 2026). What Blehar (2026) adds to this factual record is his own speculation that Allen was radicalized by Bluesky progressives calling Trump a pedophile. Nowhere in the reporting does law enforcement cite Bluesky posts as the cause. Nowhere do investigators name specific progressive commentators who allegedly drove Allen to violence. Blehar (2026) simply fills the gap with his own partisan narrative, exactly the kind of lazy cause-and-effect story he would rightly mock if it came from the other side.

Pizzagate? Never Heard of Her

If we are going to play the game of tracing political violence back to rhetoric, we should at least be consistent. Blehar (2026) brings up Pizzagate as a cautionary tale about fantasy narratives stirring madmen, and he is right that conspiracy theories can drive people to violence. But he seems to have forgotten which side produced it. In 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch fired a rifle inside Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C. restaurant, because he believed a false online story about the location (BBC News, 2016). He was sentenced to four years in prison (NPR, 2017). If Blehar (2026) wants to warn about the cost of irresponsible rhetoric, he should start by acknowledging that this danger is not exclusive to the left. Fringe actors on both sides can be stirred by irresponsible speech. Selective outrage is not principle. It is tribalism with a thesaurus.

Courts Are Real, Actually

Blehar (2026) also dismisses the E. Jean Carroll case as a pile of lies, but he offers no evidence for this characterization beyond his own declaration. He accuses the left of tossing around the word rapist as a nasty little splash of rhetorical tar (Blehar, 2026), but there is a difference between inflammatory name-calling and describing the outcome of a legal proceeding. To reduce a civil verdict to mere rhetorical abuse requires proving the legal system failed. Blehar (2026) does not even try. Conflating legal findings with casual slander is intellectually dishonest.

Russell Brand Shows Up Because Reasons

Then there is the article itself, which falls apart structurally about halfway through. After building his case against progressive rhetoric, Blehar (2026) pivots to several hundred words about Russell Brand’s Christian conversion, his book deal with Tucker Carlson’s imprint, and his inability to quote the Bible on television. This has nothing to do with the White House Correspondents Dinner, nothing to do with Cole Allen, and nothing to do with political violence. It is a rambling tangent that exposes the real purpose of the column. Blehar (2026) is not interested in a serious examination of how political speech influences behavior. He is interested in mocking people he does not like and padding his word count with cheap shots.

The Receipts Blehar Forgot to Bring

Perhaps the most revealing part of Blehar’s (2026) lecture is what he leaves out entirely. He wants to scold the left about the cost of its rhetoric, but he has nothing to say about the cost of conservative governance. Since World War II, the American economy has performed better under Democratic presidents by almost every standard metric. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled in Wikipedia (”Jobs created during U.S. presidential terms,” n.d.), total job creation from Harry Truman through Joe Biden was roughly 2.4 times faster under Democratic presidents than under Republicans. Democrats added about 70.5 million jobs over their combined terms, while Republicans added about 29.1 million. Donald Trump left office with a net loss of 2.67 million jobs, the only president in that dataset to finish with negative job growth (”Jobs created during U.S. presidential terms,” n.d.). Joe Biden, by contrast, added over 16 million jobs in his first four years (”Jobs created during U.S. presidential terms,” n.d.).

The debt picture is similarly one-sided. According to Investopedia, Republican presidents have added slightly more to the national debt per four-year term than Democratic presidents since 1913, roughly $1.4 trillion per term compared to $1.2 trillion for Democrats (Srinivasan, 2024). Donald Trump added an estimated $7.1 trillion to the debt during his single term, more per term than any president in that dataset (Srinivasan, 2024). Blehar (2026) wants to lecture progressives about fiscal responsibility and rhetorical excess, but he does so while carrying water for a movement that has repeatedly blown up the deficit and cratered employment numbers. You cannot claim to care about costs while ignoring the receipt.

Selective Outrage Is Not a Principle

Blehar (2026) is correct that political rhetoric should be grounded in fact rather than fantasy. He is correct that calling your opponents pedophiles without evidence is dangerous and stupid. But he applies that standard with a microscope aimed in only one direction. He ignores the violence spawned by right-wing conspiracy theories. He dismisses legal verdicts that inconvenience his narrative. He ignores the economic record of the party he defends. And he pads his column with irrelevant celebrity gossip to avoid doing the hard work of actual argument.

If the left is lying to itself, as the headline claims, then Blehar (2026) is lying to his readers by omission. He presents a partial picture, strips out inconvenient context, and expects applause for his courage. Real intellectual honesty requires looking at the whole board, not just the pieces you want to capture. It requires admitting that responsibility for political violence does not map neatly onto your preferred enemies. And it requires acknowledging that if rhetoric has consequences, those consequences belong to everyone, not just the people you already hated.

If you want to see what happens when a columnist argues with his own imagination and somehow still loses, step right up to the original sideshow here: https://www.nationalreview.com/carnival-of-fools/the-left-is-lying-to-itself-about-the-cost-of-its-rhetoric/

Works Cited

BBC News. (2016, December 5). Pizzagate: Gunman fires in restaurant at centre of conspiracy. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38205885

Blehar, J. (2026, April 28). The left is lying to itself about the cost of its rhetoric. National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/carnival-of-fools/the-left-is-lying-to-itself-about-the-cost-of-its-rhetoric/

CBS News. (2026, April 26). The White House Correspondents Dinner suspect sent a manifesto to his family. CBS News reviewed what is in it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-correspondents-dinner-suspect-manifesto-details/

Jobs created during U.S. presidential terms. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presidential_terms

NPR. (2017, June 22). Pizzagate gunman sentenced to 4 years in prison. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533941689/pizzagate-gunman-sentenced-to-4-years-in-prison

Srinivasan, H. (2024, December 16). Democrats vs. Republicans: Who had more national debt? Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/democrats-vs-republicans-who-had-more-national-debt-8738104

The fault isn’t that someone threw sex toys at an ICE building. It’s that this doesn’t actually fix anything. When you chuck rubber body parts over a gate, what happens next? The lady you hate gets to run away crying, then posts the video, and suddenly she’s the victim. Check the receipts: she ran off, got exactly what she wanted, and you’re the one holding the bag of battery-operated evidence.

You all saw this, right? Dozens of dildos on the ground. Was this supposed to stop deportations? Or was it just to feel good for five minutes?

Daviscourt says she got hurt. She’s an honorable woman who will sell t-shirts about this by dinner time. Who here thinks rubber projectiles fix immigration laws? Anyone? But who here also thinks it felt pretty good to watch her flee?

Here’s the real problem: when you throw a dildo at a grifter, she wins. The bad stuff people do gets shared a million times. The good points they made? Buried under plastic.

This was the part that stung most. Not the gate covered in silicone, but handing the other side a gold medal for victimhood. When Daviscourt ran from the colorful rain, she got the exact story she needed for her next paycheck.

I’m not saying protesters meant wrong. They meant well. But here’s what I know: you can’t beat liars with sex toys. You beat them by not giving them the video that pays their rent. So let me save one of those devices for myself, for when I need to remember that anger feels good, but losing the narrative war feels worse.

Observe the courageous repositioning of journalism's most agile flight risk here: https://kolektiva.social/@alissaazar/116389911016512033

mike

Noncitizen Voting: A Crisis That Doesn’t Exist (But Let’s Pretend It Does)

The SAVE Act’s core premise—that noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections in any meaningful way—is a myth. Study after study has debunked this claim. A 2022 report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that incidents of noncitizen voting are “vanishingly rare,” with most cases resulting from clerical errors or misunderstandings, not malicious intent (Brennan Center for Justice, 2022). Even the conservative Heritage Foundation, hardly a bastion of liberal thought, has documented only a handful of cases over decades (Heritage Foundation, 2024). If noncitizen voting were the crisis Cuccinelli claims, we’d see evidence of it. Instead, we get fearmongering.

Cuccinelli leans heavily on a 2018 study from Yale and Stanford researchers to argue that noncitizen voting could swing elections. But that study has been thoroughly debunked. The researchers’ methodology was flawed, relying on self-reported data from a survey not designed to measure voting behavior (PolitiFact, 2018). When other academics attempted to replicate the findings, they found no evidence of widespread noncitizen voting (Richman et al., 2018). Cuccinelli cites this study as if it’s gospel, but the academic community has moved on. Why hasn’t he?

The SAVE Act: Because ‘Illegal’ Just Wasn’t Illegal Enough

The SAVE Act’s proposed “solutions” are equally flimsy. It would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, a requirement that sounds reasonable until you consider the real-world consequences. Millions of Americans—disproportionately low-income, elderly, and minority voters—lack easy access to birth certificates or passports (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). In states that have implemented similar laws, like Kansas, voter registration rates plummeted, particularly among naturalized citizens (Brennan Center for Justice, 2023). Cuccinelli dismisses these concerns as collateral damage, but the data shows these laws don’t just suppress noncitizen voting—they suppress *all* voting.

Cuccinelli’s Favorite Study: Debunked, Discredited, and Still Somehow Useful

The timing of the SAVE Act is no coincidence. It’s being pushed just months before the 2026 midterms, a time when the GOP’s economic record is looking increasingly shaky. Inflation remains stubbornly high, energy costs are up, and unemployment has ticked upward—all under Republican leadership (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026). Instead of addressing these failures, Cuccinelli and his allies are doubling down on culture-war distractions. It’s a page straight out of the GOP playbook: when the economy falters, change the subject to “election integrity.”

Voter Suppression by Another Name: Now With Extra Bureaucracy!

Cuccinelli’s op-ed also conveniently ignores the fact that noncitizens *already* face severe penalties for voting illegally. Under federal law, noncitizens who vote can be deported, fined, or imprisoned (U.S. Code, Title 18, § 611). The SAVE Act doesn’t close a loophole—it creates a new bureaucracy to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. And for what? To make it harder for married women, as Cuccinelli so crassly implied, to cast their ballots? The subtext here isn’t subtle. Voter ID laws and citizenship requirements have historically disenfranchised women, particularly those who change their names after marriage or lack updated documentation (National Women’s Law Center, 2022). If Cuccinelli were truly concerned about election integrity, he’d focus on expanding access, not restricting it.

Economic Failures? Never Mind—Let’s Talk About Married Women’s Voting Habits

The most galling part of Cuccinelli’s argument is his claim that the SAVE Act is about “restoring faith in our elections.” But faith in elections isn’t restored by passing laws based on debunked myths. It’s restored by ensuring every eligible voter can participate without unnecessary hurdles. The 2020 election, which saw the highest voter turnout in over a century, was also one of the most secure in history (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, 2021). If Cuccinelli wants to restore faith, he should start by acknowledging that fact instead of peddling conspiracy theories.

The GOP’s Midterm Strategy: If You Can’t Win on Policy, Win by Making Voting Harder

At its core, the SAVE Act is a cynical ploy to tilt the electoral playing field in the GOP’s favor. It’s not about integrity—it’s about power. And if the GOP can’t win on ideas, maybe they shouldn’t be winning at all.

If you’d like to witness Cuccinelli’s latest attempt to turn "election integrity" into a buzzword for voter suppression, you can read his original word salad here: https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5803611-save-act-election-integrity/

Works Cited

Brennan Center for Justice. (2022). *The myth of noncitizen voting in U.S. elections*. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth-noncitizen-voting-us-elections

Brennan Center for Justice. (2023). *The impact of voter ID laws on registration and turnout*. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/impact-voter-id-laws-registration-and-turnout

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. (2021). *2020 election infrastructure government coordinating council executive summary*. https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/services/2020-election-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-executive-summary

Heritage Foundation. (2024). *Election fraud cases*. https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

National Women’s Law Center. (2022). *Voter ID laws and their impact on women*. https://nwlc.org/resource/voter-id-laws-and-their-impact-on-women

PolitiFact. (2018). *Study on noncitizen voting in U.S. elections is flawed, experts say*. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/oct/29/viral-image/study-noncitizen-voting-us-elections-flawed-expe

Richman, J., Chattha, G., & Earnest, D. (2018). *Do non-citizens vote in U.S. elections?* *Electoral Studies, 56*, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2018.08.009

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). *Economic news release: Employment situation summary*. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

U.S. Code. (n.d.). *Title 18, § 611: Voting by aliens*. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/611

Unanimous Consent Is a Funny Way to Say “Twisting Arms”

The piece opens by crediting Cornyn with a maneuver to “force Democratic colleagues to have to wait in the same long security lines as the rest of the flying public.” That is the framing: Cornyn the strategic fighter, cornering those out-of-touch Democrats who need to feel the pain they have supposedly caused. The article quotes Cornyn claiming Democrats are “completely out of touch” and framing the special screening perk as something Democrats are protecting.

Here is the problem. Seven paragraphs later, the same article states plainly: “No senator objected when he asked that it be passed by unanimous consent.”

Let that sink in. Unanimous consent means every single senator, including every Democrat, agreed to this. There was no recorded vote because there was no opposition. Yet the article wants readers to believe Cornyn forced Democrats into this position. You cannot simultaneously claim that Cornyn strong-armed Democrats into accepting his proposal and acknowledge that no Democrat objected to it. Those are mutually exclusive realities.

The Quantum Shutdown: How Democrats Can Simultaneously Block and Propose Funding

The article compounds this logical error with another contradiction on funding. It claims Democrats “have repeatedly blocked legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security.” That is the Republican talking point, dutifully transcribed. But then, just two sentences later, the article admits that “Democrats, instead, have proposed several times to fund just TSA or TSA and other critical agencies such as the Coast Guard and the Federal Emergency Management Agency but not ICE and Border Patrol. Republicans, however, have blocked these efforts.”

So which is it? Did Democrats block funding, or did they propose funding for TSA specifically while Republicans blocked it? According to the article’s own reporting, it is the latter. Democrats tried to fund the exact agency Cornyn claims they are ignoring, and Republicans said no. The article contains the facts that disprove its own headline narrative, apparently hoping readers will not notice the sleight of hand.

Stenography with a Side of Spin

This matters because framing shapes perception. When a senator can propose something that passes without objection, then get credited with forcing his opponents to capitulate, the incentive is clear. Why negotiate when you can posture? Why acknowledge agreement when you can manufacture conflict? Cornyn gets to stand on the floor blaming Democrats for a shutdown while simultaneously benefiting from their cooperation to pass his measure. It is having your cake and eating it too, and the reporting here hands him the fork.

At bottom, this is about honesty in description. If everyone agreed, say everyone agreed. If Republicans blocked TSA funding after Democrats proposed it, say that too. The facts are not inherently favorable to one side or the other. But when an article bends over backward to credit Cornyn for forcing Democrats to do something they voluntarily supported, that is not reporting. That is stenography with an angle, and readers should treat it accordingly.

If you'd like to watch unanimous consent get waterboarded until it confesses to being partisan warfare, the original assault on logic awaits here: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5793122-lawmakers-lose-tsa-expedited-passage/

Works Cited

Bolton, A. (2026, March 20). *Senate passes measure prohibiting preferential airport screening for lawmakers*. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5793122-lawmakers-lose-tsa-expedited-passage/

”Grossly Expensive” Says Woman Who Provides Zero Numbers

But that is where my agreement ends, because once again, Russel makes sweeping claims without showing receipts. She writes that the federal government is “grossly expensive, costing taxpayers way too much money.” What services, specifically, are grossly expensive? She does not say. She does not provide a single budget number, not one agency breakdown, no comparison to other countries, nothing. This is the kind of vague hand-waving that sounds good to people who already agree with you but convinces no one who actually wants to think.

Let us be clear: if you claim something costs too much, you have to say what it costs and why that number is too high. Otherwise, you are just making noise.

The SAVE Act: A Solution in Search of a Problem That Russel Half-Explains

Russel mentions the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, the SAVE Act, and calls it “uneducated nonsense” that Republicans cannot pass. She is right that it is nonsense, but she misses why it exists in the first place. The SAVE Act would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Here is what Russel does not adequately explain: noncitizen voting is already illegal in federal elections. This is not a claim that requires external research; it is basic United States law. The real impact of laws like the SAVE Act is making it harder for eligible American citizens who lack easy access to birth certificates or passports to register. That is the point. It is not about stopping fraud, which is already illegal and extremely rare. It is about stopping certain people from voting.

Russel writes that Republicans “won’t bring it to the Senate floor and let it filibuster to exhaustion.” She presents this as cowardice. I see it as strategy. Republican leadership knows that if the bill actually came to a vote, they would have to defend why they are making it harder for specific groups of Americans to register. They would rather blame Democrats than face that conversation.

Accountability for Me but Not for Thee: The Congressional Way

The core problem Russel identifies is real: Congress has no immediate consequences for failure. When they shut down the government, they still get paid. When they miss deadlines, nothing happens to them personally. This is a structural flaw in how we have designed our government. But Russel’s solution seems to be “make government smaller,” which does not actually solve the accountability problem. A smaller government can be just as incompetent and unaccountable as a large one.

What we need is real accountability. Russel mentions the No Budget, No Pay Act introduced by Senator Rick Scott. According to her column, this act would ensure members of Congress do not receive a paycheck during a government shutdown, and Democrats blocked it. If this is true, it is worth investigating further, but Russel provides no link to the bill text or vote record.

The Irony of Voting for Politicians Who Promise to Break Things

Russel calls the federal government “too large, too incompetent.” Maybe. But incompetence is not a function of size. It is a function of who we elect and what we let them get away with. If voters keep sending the same people to Washington and expecting different results, that is not the government’s fault. That is ours.

The irony Russel misses is that the people who complain most about government incompetence are often the same ones who vote for politicians who promise to break government, then act surprised when it breaks. You cannot starve an agency of resources, attack its mission, fill it with unqualified political appointees, and then complain it does not work well.

Show Me the Money or Stop Talking About Costs

Here is what I want: politicians who actually believe in governing, not just winning. I want a Congress that faces the same consequences as the people they represent. And I want columnists who show their work instead of just invoking anger and hoping no one asks for the receipts.

Russel got one thing right. That is one more than usual. But we deserve better than half-baked criticism and vague complaints about costs without numbers. We deserve arguments that can survive fact-checking. Until conservatives like Russel start providing those, they are just adding to the noise they claim to oppose.

Should you crave the experience of reading a columnist who correctly identifies congressional hypocrisy then immediately pivots to unsubstantiated claims about government size, your journey begins here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/17/tsa-lines-airport-blame-congress-shutdown/89181214007/

Works Cited

Russel, N. (2026, March 17). When will TSA be back to normal? When Congress does its job. *USA Today*. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/17/tsa-lines-airport-blame-congress-shutdown/89181214007/

Let us start with the basic facts that Russell glosses over. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or H.R. 22, passed the House on April 10, 2025. The vote was 220 to 208. Here is what Russell will not tell you: only four Democrats voted for it. Four. Two hundred and eight Democrats voted against it. That is not bipartisan support. That is a party-line vote with a handful of exceptions. When Russell claims that “Americans in both parties overwhelmingly support” this legislation and that “both parties are to blame” for its failure to pass the Senate, she is either ignorant of the actual vote or hoping you are.

The “Documentary Proof” Trap Russell Does Not Want You to Understand

The text of the bill itself, available on Congress.gov, tells the real story. The SAVE Act does not simply require voter identification. It demands “documentary proof of U.S. citizenship” for federal voter registration. Acceptable documents include a passport or birth certificate. A driver’s license is not enough unless it is REAL ID compliant and specifically indicates citizenship status. Most states do not issue REAL ID compliant licenses that denote citizenship. This means millions of American citizens who have been voting for decades would suddenly need to produce documents they may not have readily available.

Russell dismisses concerns that this would make voting difficult for married women who changed their names, calling these worries “overblown.” She offers no evidence for this claim, probably because the evidence runs the other way. According to the U.S. Department of State, only about 48 percent of Americans have valid passports. That means over half of American citizens would need to locate and present birth certificates to register to vote. For married women whose names changed, this means presenting both a birth certificate and marriage documentation to prove identity. Russell thinks this is “overblown.” I think she has never had to help a working mother track down documents from another state while juggling childcare and a full-time job.

A Solution in Search of a Problem (Because the Real Problem Is Too Many People Voting)

The purpose of this bill has nothing to do with election integrity. Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a federal crime punishable by prison time and deportation. It is also extraordinarily rare. The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of voter fraud cases, and after decades of searching, they have identified a tiny handful of noncitizen voting cases nationwide. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than to encounter a noncitizen voting in a federal election.

What the SAVE Act actually does is erect barriers to voting for American citizens who lack the specific documents the bill requires. It disproportionately affects naturalized citizens, married women, the elderly who may have lost original documents, and low-income Americans who cannot easily afford the time or money to obtain replacement certificates. It creates criminal penalties and allows private lawsuits against election officials who register voters without this specific paperwork.

Polling 101: How to Lie With Statistics (Russell’s Favorite Trick)

Russell cites a Harvard CAPS/Harris poll claiming 71 percent support for the SAVE Act. She fails to mention that this polling language likely described the bill in vague terms about showing ID to vote, not the actual requirements for documentary proof of citizenship. When Americans learn what the bill actually does, support drops significantly. Russell also cites an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll claiming declining confidence in elections. She fails to note that this decline is largely driven by Republican voters who have been fed a steady diet of lies about nonexistent voter fraud since 2020.

Russell’s call to “vote them out” if Congress does not pass the SAVE Act is particularly rich given her misrepresentation of who actually supports the bill. Senate Republicans are not refusing to bring this to a vote because they fear Democratic opposition. They are refusing because they know the bill is radioactive. They watched what happened in the House: 208 Democrats voted no. That is not a both-sides problem. That is one party attempting to suppress voter registration while pretending to care about election security.

”Other Countries Do It” and Other Weak Arguments That Fall Apart

Russell claims that “voter ID standards aren’t even controversial in other countries.” This is a red herring. Most democracies that require ID do not demand documentary proof of citizenship for registration. They accept a range of documents, including utility bills and sworn affidavits. The SAVE Act is far more restrictive than standard practice in comparable democracies.

The bill also requires states to establish programs to identify noncitizens using specific federal databases and to remove noncitizens from voter rolls. This sounds reasonable until you realize that these databases are not designed for this purpose and contain significant errors. The same databases used for immigration enforcement are not voter verification tools. Using them as such will inevitably result in eligible American citizens being flagged for removal, particularly naturalized citizens whose records may not be fully updated across all federal systems.

The Bottom Line: When Someone Says “Both Parties,” Check the Vote Count

Nicole Russell is selling a solution to a problem that does not exist, using poll numbers that misrepresent what the bill actually does, while ignoring the reality that 208 Democrats voted against it in the House. This is not bipartisan legislation. This is a voter suppression bill dressed up in patriotic language, designed to make it harder for American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote. When someone tells you that both parties support something, check the vote count. The receipts show exactly who stands where. And in this case, they show that the SAVE Act is a partisan effort to restrict voting rights, plain and simple.

Works Cited

Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. (2025, April 10). Roll Call 102: H.R. 22, SAVE Act. https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/2025102

Library of Congress. (2025). H.R. 22 - SAVE Act, 119th Congress. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/22

Russell, N. (2026, March 12). If Congress doesn’t pass the SAVE Act, vote them out. *USA Today*. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/12/trump-republicans-pass-save-america-act/89082804007/

U.S. Department of State. (2024). Passport statistics. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-statistics.html

”Radical” Is Just Republican for “I Disagree With It”

Let us begin with the central claim: that Talarico is a radical. Potas says this because Talarico supports Medicare for All, wants to eliminate the filibuster, and has made comments about race and biological sex. But here is the thing: those positions are not radical. They are mainstream. Poll after poll shows that a majority of Americans support some form of Medicare for All. The filibuster is a procedural tool that has been used to block civil rights legislation for generations; wanting to get rid of it so that majority rule can actually function is not radical, it is democratic. And the scientific consensus on biological sex has been clear for decades: sex is not a simple binary. There are chromosomal variations, hormonal differences, and anatomical variations that do not fit into neat boxes. If Talarico said there are six biological sexes, he is reflecting what biologists have known for years. That is not radical; it is scientifically accurate.

Potas also takes a swipe at Talarico for using religion to justify his positions, particularly on abortion. This is a curious complaint coming from someone who presumably has no problem with Republicans using religion to justify their positions. When a Republican cites the Bible to oppose abortion, that is principled. When a Democrat cites the Bible to support abortion rights, that is radical. The double standard is showing.

Context Is Hard, Apparently

Then there is the quote Potas pulls about Talarico saying white skin gives immunity from the virus of racism. Potas presents this as evidence of Talarico’s radicalism, but he strips away the context. Talarico was talking about white privilege, the idea that white Americans do not experience racism personally but perpetuate racist systems. It is a standard sociological observation, one made by scholars and activists for generations. Framing it as radical is either dishonest or ignorant.

The “Merit” Argument: A Greatest Hits Album of Bad Faith

Potas’s real argument, though, is about identity. He claims Democrats are obsessed with race and gender, that they think being a white religious man makes you a moderate, and that they ignore merit in favor of identity. This is a funhouse mirror version of reality. The Democratic Party has spent decades trying to win over white working-class voters while taking Black and Latino voters for granted. The idea that they are obsessed with identity is laughable. What Potas is actually mad about is that Democrats are no longer willing to pretend that race and gender do not matter in politics.

He points to Kamala Harris and says her unpopularity was due to her record, not her race or gender. But here is the problem: he offers no evidence for this claim. He just asserts it. The reality is more complicated. Harris faced a barrage of racist and sexist attacks from the moment she joined the ticket. She was called too ambitious, too loud, too emotional, all classic dog whistles used against women of color. Did her record play a role? Sure. But to pretend that racism and sexism were not factors is to ignore the last four hundred years of American history.

Same with Hillary Clinton. Potas says her loss was due to her defects as a candidate, not her gender. Again, no evidence, just assertion. Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes. She lost because of the Electoral College, because of Comey’s letter, because of Russian interference, and yes, because of sexism. Studies have shown that gender bias played a significant role in how voters perceived her. To dismiss that is to dismiss reality.

Potas ends with a call for Democrats to stop viewing race and gender as important and start pursuing candidates with merit. This is the oldest trick in the book: pretending that merit is objective and neutral when it has always been shaped by race and gender. Who gets to define merit? Historically, it has been white men who look a lot like the candidates Potas prefers. The idea that we can just ignore identity and focus on merit is a fantasy that serves those who already have power.

Projection: The GOP’s Favorite Defense Mechanism

Here is the truth: James Talarico is not a radical. He is a mainstream Democrat in a country where the center has been pulled so far to the right that basic decency looks like revolution. Supporting healthcare for all, wanting to make democracy function by eliminating an anti-democratic procedural rule, and acknowledging scientific reality about sex and race are not radical positions. They are the positions of someone who is paying attention.

Potas wants you to believe that Democrats are the ones obsessed with identity. But look at the Republican Party. Look at how they have built their entire platform around white grievance, around attacking transgender people, around banning books about race. The projection is staggering.

Talarico may or may not win in Texas. It is a tough state for Democrats, not because Texans reject moderate policies, but because the state has been gerrymandered into oblivion and voter suppression is rampant. But if he loses, it will not be because he was too radical. It will be because the game is rigged. And columns like this one, which mischaracterize his positions and dismiss the reality of racism and sexism in American politics, are part of the reason why.

To read the original column that treats "I took a poli-sci class" as a credential for ignoring four centuries of American history, click here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/14/james-talarico-moderate-democrats-texas-election/89095285007/

Works Cited

Bialik, K. (2017, September 18). How America changed during Barack Obama’s presidency. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139-167.

Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000). Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality. Basic Books.

Kaiser Family Foundation. (2024). Public opinion on single-payer health insurance. https://www.kff.org

Pew Research Center. (2016, November 9). Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. https://www.pewresearch.org

Talarico, J. (2026). Campaign website and policy positions. https://www.jamestalarico.com

USA Today. (2026, March 14). James Talarico isn’t a moderate. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/14/james-talarico-moderate-democrats-texas-election/89095285007/

Let us start with the basic numbers. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S. data centers consumed approximately 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, representing about 4.4 percent of total national electricity consumption (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024). That is already significant. But projections show this demand could reach 6.7 percent to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity demand by 2028. To put this in perspective, the International Energy Agency projects that data centers will drive about half of all electricity demand growth in the United States through 2030 (International Energy Agency, 2025).

False dichotomy

Soave frames this as a simple choice between American innovation and European stagnation. He claims Europe has “no Silicon Valley” because of high taxes and regulation. This is a nice story, except ASML, the Dutch company that manufactures the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines essential for producing the most advanced AI chips, happens to be European. Without ASML’s technology, the entire global AI industry would grind to a halt. Europe also hosts Mistral AI, a major AI competitor to OpenAI valued in the billions. Soave’s characterization of Europe as a place “where tech goes to die” is the kind of rhetoric that sounds clever until you realize it contradicts observable reality.

MORE POWER!!!!!

But the more serious problem with Soave’s argument is that he simply ignores the physical constraints of the electrical grid. This is not a theoretical concern. In March 2025, Reuters reported a “near miss” event in Data Center Alley, Virginia, where 60 data centers suddenly disconnected from the utility grid and switched to backup generators. This triggered what grid operators described as “a huge surge in excess electricity” that forced PJM Interconnection, which serves 65 million people across 13 states, to rapidly cut power plant output to avoid cascading blackouts (Reuters, 2025). John Moura, Director of Reliability Assessment at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, stated plainly: “As these data centers get bigger and consume more energy, the grid is not designed to withstand the loss of 1,500-megawatt data centers” (Reuters, 2025).

PJM Interconnection projects that by 2027, its available power will fall 6 gigawatts short of reliability requirements, largely due to data center demand (Monitoring Analytics, 2026). The capacity market auction prices in PJM have already jumped from $28.92 per megawatt-day to $269.92 per megawatt-day. Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, attributes $23 billion of recent capacity cost increases to data centers, noting these costs ultimately get passed to consumers. They describe this as “a massive wealth transfer” from ordinary ratepayers to tech companies (Monitoring Analytics, 2026).

This is what Sanders is actually talking about when he calls for a pause. It is not about hating technology or wanting America to lose to China. It is about recognizing that the current trajectory is physically unsustainable and economically regressive. When data centers consume electricity equivalent to small cities but employ fewer than one person per megawatt, while driving up electricity bills for everyone else, we have a problem that markets alone cannot solve.

Soave is manipulative and you can see it

Soave claims Sanders “thinks AI is bad” and “people making money off AI is bad.” This is a strawman. Sanders has explicitly stated his concern is about who benefits from AI and what happens to workers displaced by it. These are legitimate questions that deserve serious answers, not dismissive sneers about Marxism.

The comparison to China is particularly revealing. Soave warns that slowing data center construction means “falling behind China.” But China is precisely the country that has built the world’s most extensive high-voltage transmission network, with 42 ultra-high voltage lines enabling cross-regional power transfers of over 300 gigawatts. The United States, by contrast, built only 55.5 miles of new high-voltage transmission lines in 2024, the lowest in over a decade (Wood Mackenzie, 2025). The constraint on American AI development is not regulation. It is infrastructure that cannot keep up with demand.

Soave also ignores that China itself is limiting data center expansion in certain regions due to energy constraints. The idea that China is building data centers without regard for energy limits is false. They are building them strategically, with attention to resource allocation, which is exactly what Sanders is proposing.

What about the consumer impacts? Residential electricity prices rose 5 percent in 2025 and are projected to rise another 4 percent in 2026, partly driven by data center demand (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2025). In Virginia, electricity rates have already increased due to data center expansion. In Arizona, Microsoft had to commit to water replenishment projects because data centers were straining local water supplies. One proposed facility in Tucson would have consumed 13 million gallons annually, equivalent to 25,000 households (Microsoft, 2026).

Soave suggests the choice is between “we the people” and “we the bureaucrats,” implying that any government involvement is automatically corrupt. This is a false dichotomy. The alternative to thoughtful regulation is not freedom; it is a system where tech companies externalize costs onto communities while capturing all the benefits. When Dominion Energy, the utility serving Northern Virginia’s data center corridor, warns that grid reliability is at risk, and when PJM admits it cannot physically accommodate planned data center loads, we are past the point where “let the market decide” is a responsible answer.

Sanders is not alone in his concerns. Over 230 environmental organizations have called for a federal pause on data center construction until environmental impacts can be assessed. More tellingly, even some tech companies are acknowledging the problem. Microsoft recently announced a “community-first AI infrastructure” plan that includes commitments to not raise local electricity rates, minimize water usage, and create local jobs (Microsoft, 2026). They did this because they recognized that unchecked expansion was generating political backlash that threatened their social license to operate.

The Stanford student who asked Sanders why America innovates more than Europe received a flippant answer from Sanders that Soave rightly criticizes. But Soave’s own answer, that Europe lacks innovation because of taxes and regulation, is equally superficial. The real answer is complex: historical path dependence, venture capital concentration, university-industry relationships, and yes, different policy choices. But acknowledging that policy choices have trade-offs is not the same as pretending Europe has no tech sector, which is simply false.

Soave warns that Sanders wants to “regulate ourselves so that we fall behind enemy nations like China.” This is fear-mongering that substitutes for analysis. The actual constraint on American AI competitiveness is not regulation. It is an electrical grid that cannot handle the load. It is transformer shortages with 30 percent supply gaps and two-to-three-year delivery times (Wood Mackenzie, 2025). It is interconnection queues stretching for years. These are physical bottlenecks that no amount of deregulation can resolve overnight.

Sanders’ call for a moratorium on new data centers is not “nutty.” It is a recognition that building infrastructure at a pace that exceeds the grid’s capacity to support it is not innovation. It is speculation that imposes costs on everyone else. The question is not whether we should have AI. The question is who pays for the electricity, who gets the jobs, and whether the benefits flow to the 1 percent or to society broadly.

Soave thinks slowing down is the same as losing. But sometimes slowing down is how you avoid driving off a cliff. When your grid operators are warning of blackouts, when your utilities are raising rates, and when your infrastructure cannot keep pace with demand, the prudent thing is to pause, assess, and plan. That is not anti-technology. That is basic risk management.

The irony is that Soave, who writes for a magazine called Reason, is asking us to ignore the rational concerns of grid operators, utility regulators, and energy economists in favor of a ideological commitment to speed at any cost. Sanders is the one being practical. He is saying: let us make sure the grid can handle the load, let us make sure ordinary people are not subsidizing billionaire pet projects, and let us make sure displaced workers have a safety net. These are not radical ideas. They are common sense.

Recommendations for Soave

Soave should try reading something other than his own ideology. He might learn that ASML, the company that makes AI possible, is European. He might learn that the U.S. grid is at physical limits. He might learn that China’s advantage is not lack of regulation but massive infrastructure investment. And he might learn that being pro-innovation does not require being blind to costs.

If you would like to watch a man argue with the laws of thermodynamics and lose, Soave’s original ode to electrical fantasy can be found here: https://thehill.com/opinion/robbys-radar/5751172-sanders-silicon-valley-tour/

---

Works Cited

International Energy Agency. (2025). *Energy and AI* (World Energy Outlook Special Report). https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. (2024). *United States data center energy usage report*. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-energy

Microsoft. (2026, January 16). Microsoft announces community-first AI infrastructure commitments. *Microsoft News Center*. https://news.microsoft.com/2026/01/16/microsoft-announces-community-first-ai-infrastructure-commitments/

Monitoring Analytics. (2026). *State of the market report for PJM*. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. https://www.monitoringanalytics.com/reports/PJM_State_of_the_Market/2026.shtml

Reuters. (2025, March 15). AI data center surge strains U.S. power grid, sparks reliability concerns. https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-data-center-surge-strains-us-power-grid-2025-03-15/

U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2025). *Short-term energy outlook*. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/

Wood Mackenzie. (2025, August). *North America power transformer market outlook*. https://www.woodmac.com/research/power-and-renewables/north-america-power-transformer-market-outlook/

McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a knowledgeable legal mind, so I will treat his arguments with the intellectual rigor they deserve. I will not engage in personal attacks or partisan name-calling. I will, however, ask the hard questions that good analysis requires.

The Constitutional Reality: The Tenth Amendment Matters

McCarthy frames immigration enforcement as a straightforward federal matter that Democrats have undermined. What his argument conveniently ignores is the constitutional architecture established by the Tenth Amendment, which explicitly reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government.

The anti-commandeering principle, established by the Supreme Court in Printz v. United States (1997), prohibits the federal government from forcing state and local officials to enforce federal law. As Georgetown University constitutional law professor Michele Goodwin explained regarding the lawsuits filed by Minnesota and Illinois, the Tenth Amendment establishes the power balance between state and federal governments, often described as federalism (Goodwin, 2026).

The Constitution states that powers not granted to the United States nor prohibited to the states are reserved for the states or the people. This means states retain sovereign power to govern within their borders, and the federal government cannot impose its will on states unless such power has been granted by Congress or the Constitution (U.S. Const. amend. X).

When critics like McCarthy call for mass deportation operations without acknowledging this constitutional reality, they are proposing an approach that multiple state governments and federal courts have challenged on constitutional grounds. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison stated that the federal surge of immigration agents violated the Tenth Amendment by disrupting the state’s ability to protect residents (Ellison, 2026).

In January 2026, Minnesota and Illinois filed separate but related lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security, arguing that the deployment of thousands of ICE agents constituted a federal invasion of state sovereignty. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker stated that the state would hold the Trump administration accountable for its unlawful tactics, unnecessary escalation, and blatant abuse of power (Pritzker, 2026).

The Supreme Court addressed the balance between federal and state authority in immigration enforcement in Arizona v. United States (2012). The Court ruled 8-0 that while Congress has exclusive power over immigration, states cannot be compelled to enforce federal immigration law. The decision recognized that Congress has always envisioned joint federal-state immigration enforcement and explicitly encourages state officers to share information and cooperate with federal colleagues, but participation remains voluntary at the state level.

The Economic Reality: Industries Depend on Immigrant Labor

Perhaps the most significant gap in McCarthy’s argument is his complete failure to acknowledge which American industries rely on immigrant labor. This is not a minor oversight. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the American economy actually functions.

According to research from the Pew Research Center analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data, immigrants comprise approximately 20% of the American labor force. In certain critical industries, that percentage is much higher (Kramer, 2025).

The data show that in agriculture, fishing, and forestry, immigrant workers make up approximately 45% of the workforce. In construction, approximately 30% of workers are immigrants. In private household services, approximately 43% are immigrants, and in the broader service sector, approximately 24% are immigrants (Kramer, 2025).

Undocumented immigrants specifically make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce, but represent 15% to 20% or more in industries such as crop production, food processing, and construction (Passel & Cohn, 2024).

The consequences of ignoring this reality are already visible. After the Trump administration intensified immigration enforcement, agricultural producers reported crop losses because workers disappeared from job sites. In Texas, construction sites became quiet because few American citizens are willing to perform the dangerous physical labor that immigrant workers have traditionally done (Associated General Contractors of America, 2025).

The Associated General Contractors of America reported that approximately 92% of construction companies faced project delays due to labor shortages (Associated General Contractors of America, 2025). These are not abstract concerns. These are real economic consequences affecting real American businesses and consumers.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has acknowledged that immigration has been a key factor in labor supply growth, noting that the American economy has exceeded expectations in part because of labor supply gains from immigration (Powell, 2025).

The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City released a report in May 2025 stating that immigration over the past two years has been essential to stabilizing the American labor market and curbing wage-driven inflationary pressures. The report concluded that without immigrant labor, the American economy could not achieve a soft landing (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, 2025).

D Dallas Federal Reserve Bank labor economist Pia Orrenius stated that immigrants typically account for at least 50% of U.S. employment growth. The substantial cessation of border inflows over the past four years has had a huge impact on job creation capability (Orrenius, 2025).

The Law Enforcement Reality: Complexities Abound

McCarthy describes immigration as a law enforcement problem, which sounds straightforward. However, the actual practice of immigration enforcement is far more complicated than his framing suggests.

Recent federal court decisions have reinforced that local jurisdictions cannot constitutionally hold someone on an ICE detainer without a warrant or probable cause, and that the Fourth Amendment provides important checks on the government’s ability to arrest and detain people (Seattle Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, 2024).

The Minneapolis shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent, followed by the murder of Alex Pretti, illustrates the volatile situations that arise when federal agents conduct enforcement operations in American cities. These incidents have sparked both protests and legal challenges that raise legitimate questions about tactics and accountability (Ellison, 2026).

According to court filings, federal agents used chemical agents including tear gas against peaceful protesters, conducted raids at schools and hospitals without proper warrants, and were involved in confrontations that resulted in the deaths of American citizens (Minnesota v. Department of Homeland Security, 2026).

What McCarthy Gets Wrong

Let me be clear about where McCarthy’s argument fails:

First, he frames the problem as one of Democratic obstruction without acknowledging that constitutional federalism limits federal power to compel state cooperation. This is not a partisan point. It is a matter of constitutional law that courts have repeatedly affirmed, regardless of who occupies the White House (FindLaw, 2024).

Second, he ignores the economic dependencies that immigrant labor satisfies. The American economy has structured itself around immigrant labor in key sectors, and pretending otherwise does not make the dependency disappear. It only makes the resulting disruptions more severe (Kramer, 2025).

Third, he treats immigration as purely a legal problem requiring enforcement, when it is also an economic reality, a humanitarian challenge, and a question of national identity that requires balanced solutions rather than one-dimensional approaches.

The Center for Immigration Studies estimated in 2024 that there are about 14 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The most recent detailed breakdown by sector and state comes from the Pew Research Center’s analysis of Census data from 2022, which found that there were an estimated 8.3 million undocumented immigrants who were part of the workforce, out of 11 million total in the country at that time (Passel & Cohn, 2024).

A More Honest Framework

Immigration enforcement is genuinely important. The rule of law matters, and nations have the right to control their borders. However, honest policy discussion requires acknowledging several realities simultaneously:

The federal government cannot simply force states to do its bidding, regardless of which party controls the White House. The anti-commandeering doctrine, as established in Printz v. United States (1997), explicitly prohibits this (Printz v. United States, 1997).

American industries depend on immigrant labor in ways that enforcement-only approaches disrupt. Agriculture, construction, hospitality, and healthcare all rely heavily on immigrant workers (Kramer, 2025).

The constitutional framework establishes limits on federal power that cannot be wished away. Courts have consistently ruled that states have sovereignty rights that the federal government must respect (New York v. United States, 1992).

Policy solutions that acknowledge these realities will be more durable than those that ignore them.

McCarthy is a smart commentator who has made contributions to legal and policy discourse. On immigration, however, his argument suffers from the same weakness that afflicts much of our political discourse: it substitutes slogans for analysis and blame for problem-solving.

The American people deserve better than that. They deserve arguments that acknowledge complexity and propose solutions that can actually work within constitutional constraints and economic realities. McCarthy’s law-enforcement-only framework fails that test.

If you too wish to know absolutely nothing about which industries employ immigrants while having extremely confident opinions about them, Andrew C. McCarthy awaits you here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/04/illegal-immigration-is-a-law-enforcement-problem/

---

Works Cited

Associated General Contractors of America. (2025). *Construction workforce shortages report*. https://www.agc.org/

Ellison, K. (2026, January 12). Press conference on lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security. Minnesota Attorney General’s Office.

Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. (2025, May). *Immigration and the labor market*. https://www.kansascityfed.org/

FindLaw. (2024). *The Tenth Amendment: Reserving power for the states*. https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment10.html

Goodwin, M. (2026, January 15). Interview regarding Minnesota and Illinois lawsuits against federal immigration enforcement. CNN.

Kramer, S. (2025). Immigrant workers in the U.S. labor market. *Pew Research Center*. https://www.pewresearch.org/

Minnesota v. Department of Homeland Security, No. 26-cv-00428 (D. Minn. Jan. 12, 2026).

New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992).

Orrenius, P. (2025). Labor market effects of immigration changes. *Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas*. https://www.dallasfed.org/

Passel, J. S., & Cohn, D. (2024). Unauthorized immigrant workers in the U.S. labor force. *Pew Research Center*. https://www.pewresearch.org/

Powell, J. (2025). Remarks on the economic outlook. *Federal Reserve Board*. https://www.federalreserve.gov/

Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997).

Pritzker, J. B. (2026, January 13). Statement on lawsuit against federal immigration enforcement. Office of the Governor of Illinois.

Seattle Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs. (2024). *Frequently asked questions about local city-level immigration policy*. https://www.seattle.gov/iandraffairs/issues-and-policies/seattle-immigration-policy-faq

United States v. Arizona, 567 U.S. 387 (2012).

U.S. Constitution, amend. X.

Let me work through this systematically because this is exactly the kind of argument that sounds authoritative but collapses when you start asking questions.

The Founding Fathers Were Not What Ali Claims

Ali states that the Declaration of Independence was drafted by men “overwhelmingly Christian” who were “formed by the moral language of the Bible.” The historical record is considerably more complicated than this. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s examination of the Founders notes that “scholars trained in research universities have generally argued that the majority of the Founders were religious rationalists or Unitarians” (Britannica, 2006). Deism “influenced a majority of the Founders” according to their analysis.

Thomas Jefferson famously edited the Bible to remove miraculous elements. George Washington refused communion throughout his adult life, which his pastors interpreted as Deistic belief. Benjamin Franklin attended various churches but rarely expressed orthodox Christian views. James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, was deeply influenced by Enlightenment rationalism.

This is not to say the Founders were atheists or hostile to religion. Many were theists. But they were formed by the Enlightenment as much as by Christianity, and many specifically rejected orthodox Christian theology. Ali’s attempt to claim them as unambiguous Christian founders does not survive contact with the evidence.

Christianity and Slavery: The Complicated Reality

Ali claims that “it was not secular ideology that supplied the most powerful moral critique” of slavery. “It was Christianity.” This claim requires serious unpacking because the historical record is deeply uncomfortable.

Robert Abzug, a professor of American studies at the University of Texas, writes in his Gilder Lehrman Institute essay that “before the war, the vast majority of white Christians in both sections opposed emancipation” (Abzug, 2024). Let me repeat that because it is crucial: most white Christians, in both the North and the South, opposed emancipation before the Civil War.

The Gilder Lehrman essay also notes that “those who opposed the abolitionist doctrine of immediate emancipation certainly had the Bible and historical Christianity on their side.” Slaveholders used scripture to justify their positions, pointing to passages about servants obeying masters and the existence of slavery in ancient Israel without divine condemnation.

What Ali conveniently ignores is that abolitionists had to take RADICAL readings of Christianity that went AGAINST mainstream Christian teaching. William Lloyd Garrison and his followers were initially seen as heretical by most of the religious establishment. Many abolitionists left their churches entirely because the churches refused to condemn slavery. The mainstream religious community accommodated itself to slavery for decades before the abolitionist message gained traction.

So Christianity provided ammunition for BOTH sides of the slavery debate. The reason emancipation eventually won had as much to do with political and economic factors, Enlightenment ideas about liberty, and the brutal reality of slavery itself as it did with religious argument.

The Numbers on American Religion

Ali claims that “eighty percent of Americans still profess belief in God” while “less than a third attend church regularly.” This framing is misleading in several ways.

The Pew Research Center’s December 2025 report on religion in America found that about 70% of U.S. adults identify with a religion, with Christianity accounting for the majority of that number (Pew Research Center, 2025). More significantly, their data shows that young adults are dramatically less religious than older Americans. Among 18-24 year olds, only 56% identified with a religion in the 2023-24 survey, down from 74% in 2007.

Most importantly, the Pew report explicitly states there is “no clear evidence of a religious revival among young adults” (Pew Research Center, 2025). This directly contradicts Ali’s optimistic narrative about young people returning to faith. Young men are not converting to Christianity in large numbers. The narrowing gender gap in religiousness among young people is driven by declining religiousness among women, not increases among men.

Catholic young people attending the Traditional Latin Mass? The data shows that while young Catholics are disproportionately represented at TLM services, only about 2% of U.S. Catholic adults attend the Latin Mass weekly (Catholic World Report, 2024). This is a tiny cohort, not a revival.

Trump and the Christian Vote

Ali claims that “The Christian voting bloc played a decisive role in the election of Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2024.” This claim is technically true for white Christians specifically, but deeply misleading when presented as a general statement about Christianity.

The Public Religion Research Institute’s analysis of the 2024 election found that “more than eight in ten white evangelicals” voted for Trump, along with “six in ten white Catholics and white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants” (PRRI, 2024). Overall, 72% of white Christians voted for Trump.

But look at the other religious groups: only 13% of Black Protestants voted for Trump. Among Jews, it was 21%. Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, just 25%. Among Hispanic Catholics, only 43% (PRRI, 2024).

So Ali’s “Christian voting bloc” is actually a very specific segment: white Christians. The religious makeup of Trump’s coalition was narrow, not broad. This matters because Ali’s argument implies a unified Christian America that simply does not exist.

The Assassination Attempt and Providential Claims

Ali mentions that “when he survived an assassination attempt, a significant portion of the Christian public interpreted it as providential.” This is accurate. NPR reported that after the July 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, Trump himself said “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening” (DeRose, 2024).

Governor Greg Abbott said “Trump is truly blessed by the hand of God.” Senator Tim Scott told the Republican National Convention that “the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back up on his feet.”

But NPR also reported that this language “troubles theologian Kaitlyn Schiess,” who said rhetoric like this “usurps the position of what Christians believe: Jesus Christ as the Messiah” (DeRose, 2024). Amanda Tyler of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty described this as “very problematic theology” that conflates religious and political language in dangerous ways.

The point is not that some Christians interpreted the event as providential. The point is that doing so is theologically questionable and politically consequential in ways Ali does not acknowledge.

What the Article Actually Reveals

Reading Ali’s piece carefully, I see an argument designed to accomplish something specific. It claims Christianity as the foundation of American liberty while ignoring the ways Christianity has been used to justify oppression. It claims religious influence is growing when the data shows decline. It claims a unified Christian coalition when the religious landscape is deeply fragmented.

Ali has written extensively about the dangers of religious nationalism in other contexts, yet this article essentially makes a Christian nationalist argument: America is a Christian nation, Christianity shaped its founding, and Christianity must rescue it now. This is the same logic that leads to the kind of providential language about Trump that even some Christians find theologically troubling.

I am not opposed to religion in public life. I am not opposed to Christians participating in politics. I am opposed to bad arguments, and Ali’s article is full of them. She asks us to accept a sanitized version of American religious history that does not survive contact with evidence.

The truth is more interesting and more complicated. The Founders were influenced by both Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism. Christianity has been used both to justify slavery and to condemn it. Religion in America is declining, not rising. White evangelicals are a powerful political bloc, but they do not speak for all Christians, and their influence is tied to a specific political coalition, not to some inevitable religious revival.

Ali asks us to be grateful for a Christian inheritance. I am grateful for the genuinely liberating elements of the American experiment. But I am also clear-eyed about the ways religious arguments have been used to restrict freedom, justify oppression, and concentrate power. The same religious traditions that produced abolitionists also produced defenders of slavery. The same religious communities that support religious liberty have also supported excluding Muslims, persecuting LGBTQ+ people, and imposing biblical law on everyone.

What Ali’s article really shows is the difficulty of making a religious argument for American exceptionalism in 2026. The evidence does not support the optimistic narrative. The numbers do not show revival. The history is more contested than she admits. And the political coalition she celebrates is built on a narrowing base, not a broadening one.

I would respect Ali more if she were honest about these complications. Instead, she gives us a comforting story that happens to align with the political preferences of her publication and her audience. That is not analysis. That is advocacy dressed up as scholarship.

If you would witness what happens when a woman who escaped actual theocracy decides that the real threat is that young people are not sufficiently enthusiastic about church, read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's cultural complaint here: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/03/how-religious-liberty-sustained-america/

---

Works Cited

Abzug, R. (2024). Abolition and religion. Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/abolition-and-religion

Britannica, T. E. (2006). The Founding Fathers, Deism, and Christianity. Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-Deism-and-Christianity-1272214

Catholic World Report. (2024, September 3). Data and the Traditional Latin Mass. https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/09/03/data-and-the-traditional-latin-mass/

DeRose, J. (2024, July 15). Trump assassination attempt lays bare deep religious divisions in the U.S. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/15/nx-s1-5040606/trumps-assassination-shooting-god-religion

Pew Research Center. (2025, December 8). Religion holds steady in America. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/12/08/religion-holds-steady-in-america/

Public Religion Research Institute. (2024, November 8). Religion and the 2024 presidential election. https://prri.org/spotlight/religion-and-the-2024-presidential-election/

Bovard is vice president of programs at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where she advises on policy matters after spending over a decade working on Capitol Hill in the House and Senate. Her institutional affiliation matters because the SAVE America Act she champions has been promoted primarily by conservative organizations and Republican lawmakers.

The Core Problem: Solving a Problem That Does Not Exist

Bovard argues that federal law is “lax” on noncitizen voting and that the SAVE America Act would fix a “gaping hole” in election integrity. This framing requires immediate scrutiny because the premise is factually wrong.

It has been illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections since 1996, when Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. The penalties are severe: fines, imprisonment, inadmissibility, and deportation. A noncitizen who registers to vote can also lose the ability to ever become a citizen.

More importantly, the available evidence shows that noncitizen voting in federal elections is vanishingly rare. After the 2016 election, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed local election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigrant populations and found just 30 suspected cases of noncitizens voting out of 23.5 million votes cast. That is 0.0001%.

A Georgia audit in 2024 found 20 suspected noncitizens on the voter rolls out of 8.2 million registered voters. Nine had a history of voting, and all 20 were referred to law enforcement. In Utah, after an exhaustive review of over 2 million registered voters between April 2025 and January 2026, state officials identified only one confirmed instance of noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting.

The Heritage Foundation, which has actively promoted noncitizen voting claims, has a database of voter fraud cases. When The Washington Post reviewed this database, they found only 85 cases relating to allegations of noncitizens voting between 2002 and 2023. Most of these involved legal immigrants, and many had been incorrectly told they could vote.

Bovard invokes the 2020 election in Georgia, where Trump lost by nearly 12,000 votes, and suggests that noncitizen voting could have made the difference. But there is zero evidence to support this claim. The math simply does not work. You would need thousands of noncitizens voting illegally to swing a statewide election, and the data shows that such voting is essentially nonexistent.

The Historical Context Bovard Ignores

Bovard writes as if noncitizen voting is a novel threat that demands immediate federal intervention. But this ignores nearly a century of American history.

As many as 40 states allowed noncitizens to vote at various points in our history. The practice was common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in states with large immigrant populations. Noncitizens could vote in Kentucky until 1891, in New Hampshire until 1905, and in Arkansas until 1926. When Arkansas became the last state to outlaw noncitizen voting in state elections in 1926, it marked the end of an era.

The decision to restrict noncitizen voting in the early twentieth century was driven by nativism, wartime xenophobia following World War I, and a desire to restrict the political power of new immigrants, particularly those from Southern and Eastern Europe. That history should give us pause when we hear contemporary arguments about the need to restrict voting based on citizenship status.

If Bovard wants to claim that only citizens should vote, she is making an argument that is only about 100 years old in American practice. The notion that this reflects some timeless democratic principle is historically inaccurate.

The Georgia Myth and the Racial Turnout Gap

Bovard points to Georgia’s 2021 voter ID law for mail-in ballots as evidence that voter suppression warnings were overblown. She notes that Georgia broke records for voter turnout in the 2022 midterm elections and that Black voters reported no issues at the polls.

This argument is deeply misleading. While overall turnout was high in Georgia during the 2022 midterms, a Brennan Center analysis revealed that the racial turnout gap was larger than any point in the past decade. White turnout was 8.6 percentage points higher than nonwhite turnout in the 2022 general election, roughly 50% higher than in the 2014 and 2018 midterms.

The Brennan Center calculated that if nonwhite voters had turned out at the same rate as white voters in 2022, they would have cast over 267,000 additional ballots. Most of these, about 176,000, would have been cast by Black voters. To put that in perspective, Senator Raphael Warnock would have needed only 43,690 votes to avoid the December 2022 runoff.

The narrative that “nothing bad happened” in Georgia ignores the fact that high overall turnout can mask significant problems when the increase is driven entirely by one racial group while another group’s participation declines. That is exactly what happened in Georgia.

The Academic Evidence on Voter ID Laws

Bovard dismisses concerns about voter suppression as “mindlessness” and claims that the voter-suppression theory was “simply wrong.” But the academic research tells a more complicated story.

A comprehensive study by Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson at UC San Diego analyzed validated voting data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study between 2008 and 2012. They found that strict photo identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of Hispanics, Blacks, and mixed-race Americans.

The study found that Latino turnout was 10.3 percentage points lower in states with strict photo ID laws compared to states without such requirements. For mixed-race Americans, the effect was even larger: a 12.8 percentage point decline. In primary elections, strict voter ID laws depressed Latino turnout by 6.3 percentage points and Black turnout by 1.6 percentage points.

Perhaps most significantly, the study found that voter ID laws skew democracy in favor of whites and those on the political right. The research showed that Democratic turnout dropped by an estimated 7.7 percentage points in general elections when strict photo identification laws were in place, compared to a 4.6 percentage point drop for Republicans. For strong liberals, the estimated drop in turnout was an alarming 10.7 percentage points, compared to just 2.8 points for strong conservatives.

The gap in turnout between Republicans and Democrats doubled from 2.3 points to 5.6 points when strict photo ID laws were instituted. The gap between conservatives and liberals more than doubled from 4.7 to 12.6 points.

This is not “mindlessness.” This is peer-reviewed social science that directly contradicts Bovard’s claims.

The SAVE Act Would Disenfranchise Millions of Eligible Voters

The SAVE America Act, as described by the Bipartisan Policy Center and the Brennan Center for Justice, would require American citizens to show documentary proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate or passport to register to vote. Research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents.

According to recent studies cited by the Bipartisan Policy Center, 9% of all eligible voters do not have or do not have easy access to documentary proof of citizenship. Fifty-two percent of registered voters do not have an unexpired passport with their current legal name. Eleven percent of registered voters do not have access to their birth certificate.

Kansas offers a cautionary tale. Before its documentary proof of citizenship requirement took effect, noncitizen registration in Kansas was exceedingly rare, accounting for about 0.002% of registered voters. After the law was adopted, the documentary proof requirement prevented roughly 31,000 eligible citizens, or 12% of all applicants, from registering to vote. In short, the law prevented far more citizens from registering than noncitizens.

The Brennan Center found that the SAVE Act would disproportionately harm younger voters, voters of color, women whose married names differ from their birth certificates, and low-income Americans who may lack the resources to obtain required documents.

The Real Purpose of the SAVE Act

Bovard argues that the SAVE Act would “build public trust” in elections. But this framing obscures what the legislation actually does and why it is being pushed now.

The SAVE Act is part of a broader pattern of voting restrictions that have been enacted primarily by Republican-controlled state legislatures since the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement. These restrictions have consistently been shown to reduce turnout among Democratic-leaning constituencies while having minimal effects on Republican voters.

The Brennan Center characterized the SAVE Act as “an attack on the freedom to vote.” The Center for American Progress noted that the legislation would “invert the responsibility to verify a person’s eligibility and citizenship status from election officials and the federal government to individual voters.”

This matters because it shifts the burden of proof in a way that creates new barriers for eligible citizens while addressing a problem that essentially does not exist. The noncitizen voting rate in federal elections is so close to zero that it is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Who does the SAVE Act REALLY benefit?

Bovard asks readers to believe that the SAVE Act is a common sense measure supported by most Americans. She is correct that polls show majority support for voter identification requirements. But popularity does not equal wisdom, and the gap between a popular proposal and a good policy can be enormous.

The evidence shows that noncitizen voting in federal elections is vanishingly rare, that voter ID laws disproportionately reduce turnout among minority voters and Democrats, and that the SAVE Act would create new barriers for millions of eligible American citizens.

The question we should ask is not whether most Americans support voter ID. It is whether the SAVE Act solves a real problem or creates new ones. The evidence strongly suggests the latter.

Bovard claims that the SAVE Act would “legitimize” democracy. But democracy is not legitimized by making it harder for eligible citizens to vote. It is delegitimized by such efforts.

If we want to restore trust in elections, we should focus on things that actually affect election outcomes: adequate polling places, reasonable voting hours, accurate vote counting, and robust protection against hacking and manipulation. The SAVE Act does none of these things. Instead, it manufactures a crisis to justify restricting the franchise.

That is not common sense. That is voter suppression dressed up in patriotic language.

Bovard's remarkable independent thinking—honed over a decade on Capitol Hill, a Masters in political management, and employment at an organization that lobbies for exactly what she recommends—leads her to conclusions that will shock absolutely no one who follows money in Washington. Read the revelation here:

The Free Press

Why Voter ID Is Common Sense

Most Americans assume two basic rules already exist: You should prove who you are to vote, and only U.S. citizens should be allowed to register to vote. Yet federal law is lax on both points. Voter ID laws vary greatly from state to state, and while it’s illegal for noncitizens to cast ballots, nothing requires states to actually check whether each vote belongs to a citizen…

Read more

4 months ago · 165 likes · 330 comments · Rachel Bovard

---

Works Cited

Bipartisan Policy Center. (2026, February 2). Five things to know about the SAVE Act. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/five-things-to-know-about-the-save-act/

Brennan Center for Justice. (2026, February 2). New SAVE Act bills would still block millions of Americans from voting. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting

Brennan Center for Justice. (2022, December 16). Georgia’s racial turnout gap grew in 2022. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/georgias-racial-turnout-gap-grew-2022

Hajnal, Z., Lajevardi, N., & Nielson, L. (n.d.). Voter identification laws and the suppression of minority votes. University of California, San Diego. https://pages.ucsd.edu/~zhajnal/page5/documents/voterIDhajnaletal.pdf

Loving, S., & Morris, K. (2022, December 16). Georgia’s racial turnout gap grew in 2022. Brennan Center for Justice. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/georgias-racial-turnout-gap-grew-2022

NPR. (2024, October 12). 6 facts about false noncitizen voting claims and the election. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/12/nx-s1-5147789/voting-election-2024-noncitizen-fact-check-trump

Wikipedia. (2025). Non-citizen suffrage in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage_in_the_United_States