Jeffrey Blehar's "Carnival of Fools" Column Finally Adds a Mirror to the Midway
National Review's New Editorial Standard: If You Cannot Dazzle Them with Evidence, Baffle Them with a Random Russell Brand Tangent
Jeffrey Blehar (2026) wants to have it both ways. He says he does not want to criminalize speech, and then he spends the rest of his column blaming an entire political movement for the actions of one armed man. He insists that progressive rhetoric radicalized Cole Allen, the 31-year-old who brought weapons to the White House Correspondents Dinner, but he never actually proves the connection he asserts. He assumes it, repeats it, and then moves on to clucking about the arrogance of a failed assassin. That is not analysis. It is assuming the conclusion you set out to prove.
”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