Commentary Culture Investigations

Our fears are hypothetical, while our successes are stone cold.

Editorial Board, Issues & Insights Millions aren’t just moving out of blue states, but are moving out of blue counties within states.

Nehamas et al., NYT

Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico says he supports his state’s enormous oil and gas industry. Before running for higher office, however, Talarico sought to “inspire a new generation of climate activists” by mandating climate change lessons in Texas public schools. He also authored a Green New Deal-style bill that would have implemented statewide green energy mandates and joined a school walkout protest inspired by climate activist Greta Thunberg.
As a state representative, Talarico introduced a March 2021 bill to “ensure every public school student in Texas has a strong science-based understanding of human-caused climate change and its consequences.” Talarico said he was “so proud of the young people stepping up to push legislators like me to address the climate crisis. But we need millions more.”
The bill would have required every K-12 public school to teach kids about the “long-term problem of human-caused climate and its effects” and also about “bioregionalism, which allows us to understand our reliance on the places we live and to appreciate the plant and animal ecosystems, the watersheds, the landforms and the human cultures connected to these regions.”
“By teaching climate change in our schools, we can inspire a new generation of climate activists,” he said. Around the same time, in March 2021, Talarico introduced the Texas Climate Action Act, which would have required the state to cut its total carbon emissions in half by 2030 and by 90 percent by 2050. Far-left New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal includes nearly identical mandates.
Talarico engaged in youth-focused climate activism of his own. Less than two years before introducing his climate education bill, in September 2019, Talarico marched in a “Youth Climate Strike” in which Texas students walked out of class to march to the Texas state capitol. The protest was one of thousands that took place around the world as part of Thunberg’s “Fridays For Future” movement, which the Swedish climate activist started after she began skipping school to protest her government’s “inaction” on climate change.
Participants in the Texas protest “called for a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels,” according to a report from the left-wing nonprofit Public Citizen. Austin Climate Coalition, a now-defunct group that helped organize the strike, said the protest aimed to inspire state legislation curbing carbon emissions, which the group said would bring the “extinction” of humans, animals, and plants.
“So proud to stand with our young people during their Youth Climate Strike at the Texas Capitol,” Talarico wrote in a Facebook post that included a photo of him posing with two young girls. “Students around the world are walking out of school to save our planet. It’s time for the grown-ups to follow their lead. #ClimateStrike.”

Years earlier, while working as a middle school teacher, Talarico tweeted that he “took 10 minutes today to teach my kids about global warming.” He shared a photo of a drawing on a whiteboard that depicted the sun’s rays hitting Earth, adding, “It definitely freaked them out. #liberalpropaganda.”

Talarico’s years of climate activism contradict the energy-related rhetoric he has espoused as a Senate candidate.
On his campaign website’s “Energy & Environment” section, Talarico says he wants to “make gasoline more affordable by investing in pipeline fortification” and “add to our hundreds of thousands of oil, gas, wind, solar, and battery jobs by creating new jobs in cutting-edge technologies.” The section does reference the “climate crisis” but does not accuse the oil and gas industry of causing it and does not call for reductions in oil production or carbon emissions. Instead, it says, “If any state can figure out how to grow our economy, lower costs, and combat climate change, it’s Texas.”
In a statement shared with the Washington Free Beacon, Talarico campaign spokesman JT Ennis said Talarico supports the state’s oil and gas industry.
“James has never supported the Green New Deal,” Ennis said. “He went to public schools funded by the oil and gas industry and knows how essential oil and gas is to Texas’s economy—it’s why he supports an ‘all of the above’ energy strategy so Texas can remain a leader in oil and gas, wind, solar, geothermal, and more. James will put the economic interests of Texans first—creating good jobs and lowering energy costs.”
While he never endorsed the Green New Deal as a state representative, Talarico’s Texas Climate Action Act includes nearly identical language. Talarico’s bill, for example, would have required Texas to cut its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030, while the Green New Deal states that reductions of 40 to 60 percent are required by then. Both bills warn of cataclysmic consequences if emissions are not curbed, with Talarico’s predicting “increased natural disasters and increased, intensifying extreme weather” and the Green New Deal pointing to “an increase in wildfires, severe storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events that threaten human life.”
Months before introducing the Texas Climate Action Act, Talarico praised Ocasio-Cortez, who introduced the Green New Deal in 2019, for saying that fighting climate change will create prosperity.
Texas is the nation’s largest energy producer, according to a federal analysis. It also boasts the highest share of economic contributions by the oil and gas industry, which generates more than $400 billion toward the state’s gross domestic product, including more than $250 billion in total labor income, according to the American Petroleum Institute. Roughly 620,000 Texans work in the oil and gas industry—and Talarico’s climate history is raising eyebrows among some in the sector.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. That’s what we need to look at—James Talarico’s policies of the past, his radical environmental policies—and believe that that’s what he would enact if he were elected to the Senate,” Matt Coday, president of the Texas-based Oil & Gas Workers Association, told the Free Beacon.
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The Interior Ministry acted days after local media reported that Chinese state actors in 2024 hacked the database of a police unit assigned to protecting Chinese dissidents.

News consumer, beware: journalists are trying to redefine what “objective” means. They think objectivity is for losers who don’t have the guts to stand up for “the right side of history.”

Take CNN, which brands itself as an anti-Trump outfit. In an interview with CNN host Dana Bash for Modern Luxury magazine, writer Michael McCarthy summarized:  “Where once the journalistic mandate was often framed as presenting opposing viewpoints and allowing the audience to decide, Bash argues that such symmetry no longer suffices.”

Forget “symmetry.” Imbalance is in.

Bash argued that objective reporting now means “objectively” challenging the lies of public officials – and guess which side apparently does all the lying. “Objective reporting doesn’t mean just giving all sides of the issue,” Bash said. “Objective reporting now, rightly so, means explaining what somebody says when it’s false or when it’s not right or when it’s misleading.”

“It’s a subtle but critical distinction,” McCarthy claimed. No, it’s a very unsubtle redefinition of the word.

Consider Bash’s softball interview with Kamala Harris in 2024. This is how she approached Kamala lying about President Biden’s mental decline in office.  “Right after the debate, you insisted that President Biden is extraordinarily strong. Given where we are now, do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?” It’s not “holding government accountable” to just say “no regrets?”  

McCarthy then cited Bash working against a “backdrop of increasing hostility to journalists,” where “political figures seek to cast the media as adversarial or untrustworthy.”

Notice how reporters who promote other reporters can’t imagine that journalists offer a “backdrop of increasing hostility” to Republicans, and that no one should accept the idea that CNN is “adversarial” to Republicans. Forget the hourly evidence.

Two weeks after Bash threw softballs at Kamala Harris in 2024, she was throwing hardballs at J.D. Vance about claims the immigrants were “eating the pets” in Springfield, Ohio. Bash can feel confident she was “fact checking,” but they only seem to check one side, just like CNN “fact checker” Daniel Dale is almost entirely devoted to trashing Trump.

Criticism of CNN’s dramatic tilt is “scary in a democracy,” says Bash. “It’s intimidation. There have been different governments over decades who have tried to do that. And when it’s successful, that’s when it gets scary in a democracy. The principle is not to succumb to that.” Their journalism operates on the assumption that they can dish it out, but shouldn’t have to take it. Criticizing them is bullying or intimidation, but their nasty attack pieces are not.

All of CNN’s “succumbing” is to their Democrat pals. CNN pulled Jim Acosta off the White House beat and instead, we were “treated” to Biden soft-soapers  like Arlette Saenz, whose idea of a tough question was worrying out loud to the First Lady: “Your son Hunter has really been a target for Republicans over the years and likely will be in the years to come. How does your family deal with that intense focus on Hunter?” Saenz even stuck up for Team Biden’s use of notecards with reporter pictures and pre-determined softball questions on them.

Or consider another CNN White House reporter, M.J. Lee, who asked Joe Biden about a Russian dissident who died in prison: “Would you go so far as to say that Alexei Navalny’s blood is on the hands of House Republicans right now?”

Dana Bash can receive a glowing interview with glamorous photos in a glossy magazine, but that doesn’t mean anyone has to believe CNN’s a role model for journalists. Instead, she models how the media elitists are losing public trust with partisan spin. 

National confidence, unfortunately, is in short supply these days. In this season of springtime renewal, Americans would do well to look up — literally. Artemis II, NASA’s first meaningful manned space mission in over a half-century, has taken the nation by storm this month. In so doing, it has provided a timely reminder of what a great nation, acting with confidence and clarity of purpose, can still achieve. (RELATED: Why Artemis II Matters)
Public polling confirms that Americans are a largely pessimistic lot. Our politics are fractured, our institutions mistrusted, and our birth and marriage rates have plummeted. Hope once sprang eternal, but today’s zeitgeist is characterized by an unshakeable malaise. The daring Artemis II mission offers a rebuttal to this debilitating defeatism. Artemis II is a powerful symbol that the United States still possesses the will and the capacity to do big things. It presents a ripe opportunity to rekindle an inspiring national ethos that has been lost — one fostering greatness, rewarding courage, and embracing the frontier spirit.
Put simply, a great country is not satisfied with managed decline. A great country thinks boldly and acts boldly.
In this respect, Artemis II is deeply consonant with — indeed, it is an embodiment of — the political ethos of President Donald Trump and the broader MAGA movement. Stripped of caricature and distortion, “Make America Great Again” is, at its core, a call for national renewal — to reject complacency and reassert American leadership and excellence. Whether in trade, foreign policy, or space exploration, the premise is the same: America should lead, not follow.
Space exploration has long been one of the clearest arenas in which American leadership manifests itself. At the height of the Cold War, NASA’s Apollo program had a loftier mission than merely beating the Soviets to the moon; the goal was to demonstrate to the world the superiority of American freedom and the American way of life. Now, Artemis II carries forward that legacy in a new geopolitical context — one in which rivals like China are racing to assert dominance on land, air, sea, and beyond. If the 21st century is going to be an American century and not a Chinese century, missions like Artemis II will be crucial.
Yet Artemis II is not just a story about national power. It is also one about individual character. Consider Victor Glover, the mission’s pilot. In an era obsessed with identity politics and the divvying up of individuals into racial, ethnic, and sexual categories, Glover has offered a refreshing perspective. When recently asked about becoming the first Black astronaut deployed by NASA on a lunar mission, Glover fundamentally rejected the premise: “It’s about human history. It’s the story of humanity — not Black history, not women’s history — but that it becomes human history.” This is a tremendous, and inspiring, rebuke of today’s suffocating wokeism.
Equally significant — if not more so — is Glover’s openness about his Christian faith. He has openly spoken about the imperatives of studying God’s Creation from orbit, and he took a personal copy of the Bible with him on the journey. Glover is a throwback to an older, bygone era — one in which the most renowned scientists, such as Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, understood their endeavors as a means of employing human reason to better understand God’s Creation. This is a much more cogent understanding of the scientific enterprise than the false tension between science and religion that is often peddled today.
Taken together, the Artemis II mission and the individuals who have carried it out offer a powerful counternarrative to the dour pessimism, censorious wokeism, and rampant atheism of our age. This is a mission that embodies the best of America: technological prowess, individual excellence, and a willingness to venture into the unknown to do big, bold, and beautiful things. It is a story that has united Americans of all political, religious, racial, and ethnic stripes.
In short, Artemis II is a feel-good story. And frankly, we could use more of those.
The United States has always been at its best when it chooses outward-looking hope over inward-looking cynicism. Artemis II is a reminder that such a choice is still readily available to us. The question is whether we will choose correctly — and, in turn, help make the 21st century a distinctly American century.
READ MORE from Josh Hammer:
What Exactly Is the Purpose of NATO in the Year 2026?
Jews and Christians: United We Stand, Divided We Fall
The Shadow War Against President Trump
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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