Commentary Culture Investigations

It’s a lot of work to go through just for Democrats to tell a majority of the state’s voters that they’re wrong.

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The Anthony Fauci diary has proven to be a treasure trove of exposing, among many other things, the  very close relations between Fauci and the media that was supposedly covering him. Apparently it turned out that they went beyond covering him to the realm of covering up for him to the extent that they were unable to tolerate any criticism of Fauci.One of the big examples of Fauci’s comfy relationship with the media was the coverage/coverup of him by CNN’s Jake Tapper to the extent that he got as nasty in 2020 over criticism of Fauci in the Trump White House, specifically by Trade Adviser Peter Navarro, as he was when snapping at Lara Trump in the same year for suggesting that Joe Biden suffered from cognitive decline.Here is the segment from the July 15, 2020 edition of The Lead in which a highly agitated Jake Tapper went full snarl at the very idea that his beloved Anthony Fauci could be subjected to criticism.Here are a few lowlights of Tapper’s pompous lecturing:We begin today with the politics lead. The White House war on science and medicine has only gotten worse. But, today, the nation’s top infectious disease expert is punching back, amid new attacks from the White House, or, more specifically, from Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who wrote in a “USA Today” op-ed that Dr. Fauci has been wrong about every coronavirus issue they have discussed, a claim that seems quite difficult to believe for any sentient being who has been following this story….That’s Dr. Fauci being characteristically diplomatic.Let me not be diplomatic.The White House campaign to undermine Dr. Fauci is dishonest, it’s disgusting, it’s deranged. And at a time of a deadly pandemic, it is the ultimate in irresponsibility. Literally, more than 136,000 Americans are dead because of this virus, and, instead of an aggressive national testing and contact tracing program, the White House is instead launching an aggressive smear campaign against the guy trying to save our lives….And let’s also just remember the context of this is that President Trump has misused science and scientific agencies in order to push forward lies, for whatever reason. A perusal of Fauci’s diary reveals the over-the-top close relationship between him and Tapper which helps explain the extreme unprofessional bias exhibited in the clip above. Examples of the Tapper-Fauci chumminess appear multiple times in the diary. Here are a but a few diary excerpts:April 13, 2020: Phone call with Jake Tapper. Jake wanted to make sure the interview did not cause me any problems.April 26, 2020: Deb was on CNN with Jake Tapper and did not answer the question of whether it was a mistake for the POTUS to talk about injecting or swallowing bleach. Jake wrote me a text afterwards and said: “Birx has lost her way I fear. She has chosen to focus on defending the president and attacking the press. Odd.July 1, 2020: Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC. Terrific couple. Friendship building.July 26, 2020: Jake Tapper woke me up at 11:23 AM (I went to bed early) furious at POTUS for tweeting about the fact that Jake severely questioned Brett Giroir on SOTU CNN show today. Jake was really pissed at the craziness of it all.October 23, 2020: Had dinner at my home with Jake and Jennifer Tapper. Relaxed, good time. Jake clearly believes that Trump is totally nuts.Exit question: Will Jake and Jennifer dine again with Dr. Fauci after his testimony on Capitol Hill on Wednesday? Friendship building.

From the Soviet Union to East Germany to North Korea, The New York Times has a long and infamous history of going soft on communist countries. On Monday, one day after the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, it added Cuba to the list.Under the headline “Cut off from Fuel, Cuba is Still Surviving,” read the subheadline “President Trump has tried to strangle Cuba by blocking its oil imports. But six months later, the island is finding ways to endure.That set the tone for the article. Amid stories of Cubans making their own fuel and using lithium batteries and Chinese solar panels and electric rickshaws, Mexico City bureau chief Jack Nicas knew who to blame for Cuba’s economic woes, “[Trump] imposed an oil blockade that has pushed the island into its worst ever energy crisis, with mass blackouts now lasting nearly all day. And yet, more than six months later, the Cuban government and people are still standing.”Beyond Trump, Nicas blamed the U.S. for Cuba’s general state of affairs, “Over nearly seven decades of U.S. pressure, Cuba has defied the odds and improvised to survive. Now it seems that Mr. Trump, like many U.S. presidents before him, is also finding that toppling the government founded by Fidel Castro is not so simple.”After highlighting some interviews with locals, Nicas returned to Trump:Other than a single Russian oil tanker in March, allies have not been willing to test Washington’s effective oil blockade.As a result, Cuba has been powering its electric grid solely with domestic oil and gas and a growing network of solar parks sponsored by China. Together, they are enough to support roughly half of Cuban demand, according to Jorge Piñón, who studies Cuban energy at the University of Texas.Nobody Nicas interviewed put the blame solely on Cuba’s government. He wrote “Exhausted Cubans told us they were angry at both Havana and Washington. Yet no one said they planned to take to the streets. Aside from banging pots and pans, the Cuban people have hardly staged protests.”That’s not true, but at least Nicas did find one man to tell him, “You go out to express your opinion on the street, and they throw you in jail or fine you.”However, another man furthered the America-blaming by referring to his solar panels and rickshaw, “Now he can power the entire battery by parking it in the sun for a day. ‘To me, this is the future,’ he said. ‘We’re going to overcome the U.S. blockade.’”On Tuesday, Nicas admitted in a video report that the electric grid was already failing due to government mismanagement, but still try to suggest Trump was most at fault, “It’s been more than six months since the Trump administration’s oil blockade on Cuba set off what is becoming a humanitarian crisis.”Nicas’s concession is also an understatement. Cuba’s 20+ hour per day blackouts predated the blockade.In a separate article, Sam Sifton interviewed Nicas about his trip and whether the government had any say in the matter, “How hard was it to get your visa? Did government minders follow you around?Nicas recalled insisting that he would be fair to the communists, “It took a lot of convincing to get. I met with top Cuban diplomats in Mexico City, Havana, Washington and New York over six months, and sent many letters, to persuade them that we would tell this story fairly. Once we got to Havana to report, we met with Cuban officials a few times, but they otherwise didn’t bother us. We traveled around freely, decided our story targets and chose whom we interviewed.”Elsewhere in that interview, Nicas conceded “some saw the Cuban government at fault” for the country’s problems, but none of those people managed to make it into the main article.

So far, though, the party’s establishmentarians are doing it the only way they know how: meekly and by committee.

The Democratic nominee running in Ohio’s 15th Congressional District, Don Leonard, says he’s not a democratic socialist but would “lie to the people of my district” to “get their votes” if he were. Leonard, a former Ohio State University professor, has supported the Bernie Sanders-backed Working Families Party (WFP) and wrote in an academic paper that the best outcome for the United States is a socialist “counter-movement.”
“I am not a democratic socialist. Even if I were, I’d lie to the people of my district in order to get their votes,” Leonard said with a laugh on the Hilliard Beacon Podcast in March before praising Sanders. It was at least the second time he commended the Vermont senator while denying being a democratic socialist.
Yet Leonard, who was an Ohio State professor of city and regional planning until he resigned in January, has repeatedly shown a penchant for socialism. In December, he donated $100 to the WFP, campaign finance records show. That same month, he praised the group’s call to tax billionaires to bankroll government programs that would provide “Health Care You Can Rely On,” “Child Care When and Where You Need It,” and “Time to Spend With Your Family.”
“Working Families Party is on point here. Making homes, health care, and child care more affordable would allow all of us to spend more time with our family,” Leonard wrote in a December Facebook post. “The one thing I would add is to provide support for family home care so that parents have the option to be with their children through the first year and retirees can afford to age in place.”
In February, he called the group’s rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, delivered by “Squad” member Rep. Summer Lee (D., Pa.), the “Best take on last night’s SOTU in my humble opinion.” Lee praised New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist endorsed by the WFP, and left-wing policies like Medicare for All.
Lee’s remarks are representative of the types of policies and candidates WFP has long supported. The group has also endorsed Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Melat Kiros, a House candidate running in Denver who said the Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 terrorist attacks were “inevitable.” Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, in 2016 called WFP the “closest thing there is to a political party that believes in my vision of democratic socialism.”
Leonard did not respond to a request for comment.
His support for democratic socialism is set to create a hurdle for him as he attempts to unseat GOP Rep. Mike Carey in a competitive swing district. The GOP holds a slight advantage there, while a poll by the House Majority PAC, the spending group aligned with House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), found Leonard trailing Carey by 5 percentage points.
Leonard has included his preference for democratic socialism in his academic work, as well. In August 2025, he authored a paper arguing that the United States was “backsliding” due to “populist political outsiders” seeking to “dismantle institutional constraints on executive power.” The country’s best path forward, he wrote, is a “Polanyian counter-movement towards a new social-democratic order,” a reference to the Hungarian socialist and economist Karl Polanyi.
Leonard questioned if there was “hope for US democracy” in the face of Trump’s America and hoped that, like how the “unfettered capitalism under nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century liberal economic orthodoxy triggered a Polanyian movement towards social democracy, perhaps the US is headed for a new New Deal moment.”
He referenced Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation, which argues that self-regulated markets lead to social backlash. Polanyi pushed for a “guild-socialist-organized” form of socialism that included controls like labor protections and social insurance.
Elsewhere, Leonard has been tied to other left-wing movements. He has called to “replace ICE completely” and was arrested at a “No Kings” protest in March after he told police he was “disobeying” their instructions to step toward their vehicles after attempting to give a speech using a megaphone. He was cited for violating a noise ordinance and was charged with obstructing official business, a local NPR affiliate reported.
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Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, hosts of the I’ve Had It podcast, claim that homeschooling is “a bad idea from soup to nuts.” (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 409: Marxism Infiltrated The Public School System. How Can We Stop It?)

‘I’ve Had It’ co-host Angie Sullivan on homeschooling….
“You would not believe how many people in Bible study homeschool their kids, and you just think, ah, I worry about that.”
“I just think homeschooling is a bad idea from soup to nuts. I don’t care if you’re a nuclear… pic.twitter.com/GKbhROgDGs
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 14, 2026

The Spectator P.M. Podcast hosts Lyrah Margo (who received a public school education) and Madelynn McLaughlin (who received a homeschool education) discuss and react to Welch and Sullivan’s outrageous comments about homeschooling. Lyrah and Madelynn draw on personal experiences growing up in different educational settings and defend the homeschool experience. (RELATED: American Education Is in Almost Irredeemable Decline) 
Tune in to hear their discussion!

Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify.

Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble.

President Trump finally served up his long-planned speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and they hated it so much the reporters started kvetching about how they need to “rethink” this event, since Trump was not “advancing” the First Amendment with his mockery of the press.NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck and Associate Editor Nick Fondacaro joined me to discuss how the elitist media  demonstrate the old maxim that they can dish it out, but they can’t take it. They can call him Hitler, but you can’t compare them unfavorably to anyone. This is how they understand the First Amendment — it protects them, and nobody else. Criticizing them and mocking them is somehow contrary to freedom of speech, not an exercise in freedom of speech. Comparing CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to trans-woman actor Dylan Mulvaney is grossly wrong, as was cartooning CBS News under “gay dictator” Bari Weiss as comparable to Iran.New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker tweeted on X on Saturday that it is time for the White House Correspondents’ Association to “rethink” its annual dinner with the president, since it did not “advance” the cause of reporting “without fear or favor.” As if that motto isn’t ridiculous at this point? Baker hates Trump and loves Obama.The tilt of WHCA journalism awards at this dinner also lean to the left, just like the Pulitzer Prizes. This year’s slate was dominated by anti-Trump scoops. So what? It’s a White House reporter dinner. But Curtis has pointed out they did not give out one of the WHCA awards for anti-Biden scoops. Last year, after Biden was forced out of the 2024 campaign, they honored Alex Thompson’s late reporting on Biden’s cognitive decline.Enjoy the podcast below. The audio can be found here.