Commentary Culture Investigations

In a rare editorial that will surely send the media hall monitors into fits, CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil absolutely eviscerated the Democrats for coddling Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner (he hasn’t withdrawn yet). But Dokoupil was only half right.

Watch the editorial, as aired on the CBS Evening News on Thursday, July 9th, 2026:

WATCH: CBS’s @tonydokoupil SAVAGES the Democrats’ embrace of Graham Platner, despite the many obvious red flags that emerged throughout the campaign. On the nose for sure, but Tony D missed a spot: the media coddled Platner as well. The media hall monitors will rage nonetheless.… pic.twitter.com/452IZIebwY
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) July 9, 2026

TONY DOKOUPIL: The Big Question tonight is why did so many in the Democratic Party, the party of Black Lives Matter and Believe Women, continue to see Graham Platner as a future star? Despite scandal after scandal that seemed to undermine those principles and more? Despite his old Reddit comments about, among other things, why Platner thinks black people don’t tip? Despite his chest tattoo with a Nazi history? And despite the accusations of abuse against women? Through all of that and more, Platner downplayed or denied the claims and was defended by the party in some of its biggest voices.

CHRIS Van HOLLEN: I do believe people should have second chances.

CHRIS MURPHY: If this is a character election, the incumbent has a lot to answer for as well.

BERNIE SANDERS: I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that Graham Platner is the next senator from the State of Maine. 

DOKOUPIL: So what’s behind all that support for him until now? Could it simply be that he was winning? That he had blown out the sitting governor in the Democratic primary? It sure seemed like the Democrats’ best chance to beat Maine’s Republican Senator Susan Collins. In political circles, the answer, it appears, was yes. Many Democrats knew Platner had character issues. The theory, from Daniel Moraff, the political strategist who plucked Platner from obscurity, and made him into a star, was that the voters wouldn’t care. That they wanted, quote, “real people who have lived real lives.”

DANIEL MORAFF: I think we want people who didn’t run for student council, right? We want people who have not been spending their entire lives planning their ascent to political power.

DOKOUPIL: But after Platner was accused of rape this week, it turned out that theory had its limits. Character does matter. Platner denied the accusation, but for some Democrats, he’d committed the one offense no political party can tolerate. He started to look like a loser.

Dokoupil spared no words as he tears through Democrat leaders willing to look past Platner’s rows of red flags in pursuit of power. He is also right that Democrats only ditched Platner once it became apparent that he might lose to longtime incumbent Susan Collins. The latest allegations provided the offramp, and the rejection cascade ensued.

But what’s lost in all of this, and where Dokoupil falls short, is that the Elitist Media are just as culpable of the same willful omissions. The media looked the other way at the Totenkopf tattoo, reluctantly covered the sexting scandal, and joined The New York Times in making conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield the focus of that particular story- a modified “catch and kill.” 

The media are just as guilty of enabling Platner as the rest of the left. That essential part of the story was missing from an otherwise trenchant and much-needed editorial.

 

What can you say about a country that was decimated? That it loved martyrdom?
Iran has certainly been defeated on the battlefield, but by not yet losing the war, it has gained stature in geopolitical influence with its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz, and some sympathy in the typically anti-West Global South — for standing up to the combined kinetic fury unleased by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, and continuing the fight, unbowed. The Iranian center of raw power currently lies with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), more than the mullahs who provide doctrinal support.
With its grip on the Strait and array of missiles and other asymmetric weapons, the Iranian regime is still a problem. They will bob, weave, and go on the bicycle and create a mess of indefinite uncertainties to torment the United States and demonstrate their global leverage, even as they are militarily weak. They will tweak us on the nose, fire an occasional barrage of missiles, and maintain the objective of a nuclear weapon — even a backpack nuke would suffice.
Our foreign policy establishment needs to understand that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will never think like us, and we cannot make them be like us or behave like us.
In dealing with Iran, our foreign policy establishment needs to understand that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will never think like us, and we cannot make them be like us or behave like us. They can gun down tens of thousands of their own citizens and, in a death cult, encourage their proxies, young men and women, to die for them by detonating suicide vests packed with ball bearings and nails for maximum casualties. Iran is doubtless a thugocracy, parading under the diadem of Islam, with a fanatical ideology transmitted to people in the street. The hatred of the West is more than about pangs of anger over the loss of their oil franchise to the British in the early 2th century, and the 1953 coup d’état organized by the CIA and MI6 to oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Operation Ajax.
It is about their perceived decadence of a godless Western culture, which they believe has over the decades inflicted itself into the mainstream of Iran — alcohol, perfume, short skirts, cinema, LGBTQ, interest on loans, multinational retailers, and other trappings of the West that motivates them.
In the circles of D.C. groupthink, it is easy to intellectualize about nation-building and human rights and responsibly integrating Iran into the world of trade and investment to benefit its people. The IRGC does not think like this: They crave raw power, offshore capital, and self-preservation. All they understand is an iron fist in an iron glove, to twist Napoleon Bonaparte’s famous saying. Through concessions and diplomatic initiatives, we cannot turn the IRGC into latte-sipping Ivy League MBAs, debating fixed versus floating exchange rates. Members of the IRGC are not dealmakers — they are widow makers.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) is dead, and combat, which ceased for only an interlude, has recommenced in earnest. Of course, the regime set up the United States for failure of the MOU. It was not realistic from the outset, since the first point of the MOU requires the cessation of military operations by the United States and Iran everywhere, including the Israeli operation in Lebanon, “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon.” Without Israel being a party to the document, the burden of managing Israel rested upon the United States against continuing provocations by Hezbollah, a separate entity from the Islamic Republic of Iran, over which it denies control. (RELATED: Iran: Crippled but Still Dangerous)
Until Israel is inside the tent, and an agreement among the three parties is achieved, an MOU would be ineffective and dead, not quite on arrival, but soon thereafter.
As I wrote in The American Spectator in mid-March, the United States should prepare for a long, direct war with Iran. We may be able to negotiate some stopgap measures to ease traffic in the Strait and to exact promises with regard to abandonment of nuclear aspirations — but we cannot trust the IRGC. Only regime change and, ideally, development of a secular nation will provide the necessary comfort level for compliance and trust. (RELATED: America Needs to Prepare for a Long Iran War)
A moderate Islamist government could be a second choice, but there could be continuing skepticism over intent. The U.S. will be wise to maintain good relations with Israel, because of its intelligence capability on the ground, which has demonstrated amazing effectiveness with regard to the decapitation attack and earlier covert actions. Finding and recruiting contacts in the opposition and dissidents in the government, IRGC, and regular army (Artesh) will take time. As I have also written in these pages, in the wings are about 200,000 well-trained, well-armed, and pro-American Kurdish Peshmerga who helped the U.S. get rid of ISIS in Syria. Their engagement would be a wild card that risks a wide ground war, opposition from Turkey, and the potential breakup of Iran’s territory. Their operational support may become yet another less unacceptable option, but an option to keep open.
In the meantime, we must fasten our seat belts. Given Iran’s antipathy for Britain and the U.S. and its well-known penchant for French culture, we should say, “Attachez vos ceintures.”
READ MORE from Frank Schell:
The New York Times Declares Victory for Tehran
Iran: Crippled but Still Dangerous
Iran: ‘The Clock Is Ticking…’
Frank Schell is a former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago and was later a management consultant. He was a lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals.
Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

Conventional wisdom holds that communism fell with the Berlin Wall. Results from the recent primaries in New York City suggest that, as Mark Twain might say, reports of communism’s death were greatly exaggerated. (I follow the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn here in making no distinction between “democratic socialism” and communism.)
People vote for socialism for all kinds of reasons: envy of the rich, personal greed, a vulnerability to social contagion, or just being young. The more sophisticated socialists (and socialist-adjacent politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama) make a moral case for socialism that on its face seems compelling.
But the secret which Dostoevsky well understood was that all assumptions of responsibility for others must be voluntary.
The argument goes like this: We are all in this together. Whatever you have acquired or built came partly from the labors of society as a whole, and as a member of this society you owe a certain debt to your fellow humans and a responsibility to “pay your fare share.” This responsibility requires you to give up certain rights, say the right to private property, or to own guns, in order to benefit the collective. The good of the many is more important than the peevishly-held rights of any individual. I say this seems compelling because there is a grain of truth here. The most persuasive arguments I know for it actually come not from moral philosophers (and certainly not economists) but from literature.
In Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls we follow lone-wolf saboteur Robert Jordan as he is assigned the mission of blowing up a strategic bridge to aid the communist-led cause in the Spanish Civil War. Along the way, Jordan finds he cannot complete the mission without the cooperation of an often unreliable and self-interested group of communist guerillas in which he has been embedded. For the socialist Hemingway (who would go on to openly support Fidel Castro), this was the illustration of a great moral truth. “No man is an island, entire of itself” goes the book’s epigraph by the poet John Donne. Like it or not, we are intricately involved with all mankind.
Likewise in a famous essay titled “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde argues that private property is a “nuisance” and impediment to human flourishing. In his trademark wittily ironic and elegant style, Wilde states that “Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it” will free us from the tedious obligations that come with owning things as well as the perennially troubling questions of what to do about the poor. Wilde believes that once freed from these obligations, “nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. “One will live.” He adds the eminently quotable line: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
Let us say that we conservatives, who are compassionate people with a strong instinct for civilizational flourishing, are persuaded by these arguments. Let us say also that we have decided to ignore the fact that Mr. Hemingway was a man of substantial wealth, an extremely zealous guardian of his own intellectual property rights, and a shrewd investor in both stocks and well-to-do wives. Likewise, let us ignore the fact that when Mr. Wilde found himself penniless at the end of his life and dependent on friends for support he regarded it as anything but ennobling. Further let us also overlook the fact that Mr. Wilde could be said to have gotten a taste of late-stage socialism as he served a sentence of hard labor at Wandsworth prison and was reduced, as he tells us in De Profundis, to begging for extra breadcrumbs because there was never enough to eat.
If this is indeed our guiding principle — that individual rights should yield whenever doing so benefits the collective — then the next question is obvious: Which rights are the left willing to give up for the common good? Fortunately, we have an abundance of data on what makes a healthy, prosperous society. Therefore, be it resolved that henceforth:
Everyone shall be required to work a steady job, to be married and monogamous, and to bring forth many children. (This shall include homosexuals, playboys, and strong, independent women who don’t need a man.)
No one is allowed to smoke marijuana or play more than one hour a week of approved video games.
As there is robust evidence that it causes depression, social media will be banned. Say goodbye to your profanity-laced tirades against ICE, your hysterical screeds warning of impending fascism, your mindless reposts of Heather Cox Richardson, and showing off your anti-Elon tattoos.
Everyone is required to exercise regularly and eat their veggies at every meal. Since it leads to nutritional deficiencies, vegetarianism is strictly forbidden. (Vegans shall be jailed and force-fed a diet of brisket and barbecued ribs.)
Since loneliness shortens life expectancy, the state shall assign companions to the chronically single. (Incels, rejoice!)
As happiness correlates strongly with religious participation and volunteering in many studies, you will be required to attend an approved church and participate in service work. Attendance records will be maintained.
And finally, as the right to life is no more sacred than any other right, and the diseased and disabled are a burden to society, the state shall euthanize the weaklings among us. At the end they will have eternal comfort in knowing they did their part for the greater good.
The modest proposal I’ve laid out is not some theoretical reductio ad absurdum. Elements of these policies have been realized historically in nearly every Communist society, as they are in China today, with the “social credit score.”
So what then of our literary argument, which so many people find persuasive, even if they’ve never read Hemingway or Wilde, and which I said contains a grain of truth.
The final answer comes from another work of literature, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoevsky accepts Hemingway’s argument that we are responsible for the lives of our fellows. In fact he pictures a form of maximal responsibility, as when the gentle, saintly Father Zosima bows to the violent, lustful Dmitri, touching his head to the sinful man’s feet, and rising, says, “Forgive me, all of you.”
But the secret which Dostoevsky well understood was that all assumptions of responsibility for others must be voluntary. They are convictions of conscience, not coercion. It is only in their free choices that men and women have an opportunity to be virtuous, to be kind, to be charitable, to offer forgiveness or obtain redemption. The “soul of man under socialism” is no soul at all. For this reason, our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, messy as they are, must remain unalienable. We need no arguments from literature for this: We hold these truths to be self-evident.
READ MORE from Chris Jansen:
The Great Amnesia
READ MORE:
The Moronic Idiocy of ‘Municipal Socialism’
Echoes of Cuba in Caracas
Chris Jansen is a translator, essayist, and poet. His books include Hamlet Decoded, We Can Be Heroes: A Rehab Memoir, The Last Mayan, and The Lost Poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

The American Spectator’s own Paul Kengor has brought decades of expertise on Karl Marx and communism to Dr. Jordan Peterson’s educational Peterson Academy platform in a new eight-part lecture series, The Dark Side of Marxism.
The course grew out of Kengor’s June 2024 appearance on The Dr. Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, during which they discussed the dark life, writings, and ideas of Karl Marx. During that conversation, Peterson told Kengor that he was preparing to launch an online academy and wanted someone who could speak directly about what Kengor calls the “dark, diabolical side of Karl Marx and Marxism.” (RELATED: Who Made It Into the ‘Hall of Evil’?)
“I was so pleased when the Peterson Academy folks asked me to do this series,” Kengor said. “This is material that badly needs to be known, and knowing the power of Peterson’s reach, I knew we could make an impact.”
Peterson Academy was founded out of Peterson’s frustration with the ideological conformity and exorbitant costs of today’s higher education. The academy seeks to provide an alternative to modern academia by bringing together experts from a wide range of academic and professional fields to teach accessible, affordable courses. Kengor’s course adds a detailed account of Marxism and communism to that growing catalogue. (RELATED: To Hell With Karl Marx)
The course was filmed before a live audience in Scottsdale, Arizona. Kengor praised the academy’s “first-rate group of professionals” and described its facilities as “a very impressive studio … They used multiple cameras — more than I’ve faced in major TV studios.”
The series examines Marxism not merely as an abstract political or economic theory, but as an ideology with a long and bloody mark on modern history. Kengor begins with Karl Marx’s disordered life, writings, and lifelong fascination with the devil before tracing the development of Marxist thought and the spread of communism through Bolshevism and the Soviet Comintern. Later lectures examine communist rule outside of Russia under Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
The course also covers the history of American communism and the pivotal roles of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in ending the Cold War. Kengor examines the human cost of Marxist ideas put into practice, including the more than 100 million deaths attributed to communist regimes around the world.
The Dark Side of Marxism may be the first of several lecture series Kengor produces with Peterson Academy, as discussions are already underway about what subject he might tackle next.
READ MORE:
To Hell With Karl Marx
Who Made It Into the ‘Hall of Evil’?
Watch The American Spectator Editor Paul Kengor’s Remarks on Marxism and International Women’s Day

The latest NewsBusters study underlined that ABC, CBS, and NBC unloaded more than 27 hours of coverage on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, mostly playing up his association with President Trump (and not Bill Clinton). By contrast, the networks spent months ignoring Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo and other embarrassing scandals.  

Managing Editor Curtis Houck joined the show to discuss his study numbers that he’s worked on for a year. Associate Editor Nick Fondacaro also joined the show to update us on how Zachary Young’s book on his victorious defamation lawsuit against CNN is getting enormous hostility from the CIA. They told him to delete his entire book, which is ridiculous.

If we’ve learned anything at NewsBusters about the network coverage of Donald Trump, it’s that it’s reliably about 90 percent negative, no matter what is actually happening. Trump’s coverage was highly negative after he was shot in the ear in 2024.

But their aggression on the “Epstein files” and connecting Trump to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been massive in the last year. Curtis found that ABC, CBS, and NBC combined for 1,627 minutes of obsessive coverage (or 27 hours and seven minutes). Curtis then listed what could be done in that long time fame: 

Run six marathons.
Walk 88 miles.
Watch over 10 Major League Baseball games.
In February, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos proclaimed that the Epstein story “has bedeviled President Trump’s second term,” as if the media hasn’t chosen to “bedevil” Trump constantly with it. Given that Trump broke off his friendship with Epstein before he was revealed as a sex offender, it’s hard to claim they were sex-abuse buddies. Stephanopoulos would never engage in this kind of smear over his old boss Bill Clinton’s friendship with Epstein, which would explain why this never became an issue in the Hillary vs. Trump race in 2016.

The first Trump term was dominated by the Russian collusion hoax. The networks have tried to make the second Trump term about the Epstein collusion hoax. This is why nobody needs them for “news.”

Graham Platner reluctantly ended his campaign for the Seante in Maine, and it’s obvious that the Democrats and their media allies made all kinds of ridiculous excuses for all of the scandals pouring out of Platner’s history, things that he has done and things that he has said. The networks couldn’t find the story of the Nazi SS tattoo for months. Platner’s wife warning his campaign that he had sent sexual texts to other women was the story that spurred the networks to mention him.

What may look the most ridiculous now is the TIME magazine cover story just seven weeks ago by Julia Terruso: “After decades of nominating buttoned-up technocrats with glittering résumés, many Democrats want candidates with flaws, faded ink, and redemption arcs that resemble their own. Platner’s past, in other words, may actually be his path.” She then quoted an Obama adviser, Jim Margolis, to underline it: “Democrats are willing to bet on someone who may have a few warts but feels fresh, unscripted, and tuned in. His ‘difference’ may well be his secret sauce.”

One of the most bizarre flip-flops came from The View co-host Sunny Hostin, who marched on a hard line advocating for Platner to stay in the race and voting for Platner no matter what came out in the press. Then, on the morning before Platner withdrew, Hostin flipped and said he had to go. Who got to her?

We had to discuss Hostin’s bizarre reaction coming out of the July 4 weekend on Monday, being triggered by the American flag:  “When I walk into a community and I see American flags all over the community and I suddenly feel unsafe, because there’s a section of this country that has co-opted the American flag and they equate being an American or an American flag with white supremacy.” 

Enjoy the podcast video below. Like, share, and subscribe.

 

Stu Smith, City Journal The Democratic Socialists of America’s Red Rabbits Security Commission, a subgroup within the DSA focused on “community defense” efforts, is, according to its…

Deep Background, Substack A federal drug discount program created to help vulnerable patients may be doing anything but – and the hospital lobby is fighting to keep it that way.