Commentary Culture Investigations

It’s time.
Time for conservatives to take a pause and realize that yes, amidst the whirlwind of current events, this is indeed a Conservative Moment — and a good one.
Lest anyone out there think I’ve taken leave of my senses, a look back in history may be needed.
Once upon a time there was no “conservative” movement to speak of. The conservative “leader” as such was Ohio’s Republican Senator Robert Taft. Taft, the son of President William Howard Taft, was very much the “Mr. Conservative” of his day.
Serving in the U.S. Senate from his election in 1939 until his death in 1953, Taft would several times seek the GOP presidential nomination. Losing each time, most notably in 1952 when running against World War II hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower was the champion of the GOP moderates of the day; his eventual nod in the conservative direction was picking young rising star California congressman and later senator Richard Nixon as his running mate. Nixon, who had built his reputation tracking down Communists in government, notably liberal idol and Roosevelt/Truman political appointee Alger Hiss, was seen in the day as a vivid anti-Communist. (RELATED: Nixonmaxxing: From Watergate to Gen Z White Pill)
But by the end of the Eisenhower administration’s two terms, there were rumblings on the Right — and focus began to shift to Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. With Nixon’s loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Goldwater and his decided conservative allies set about targeting the 1964 GOP presidential nomination. After a bruising series of primaries, Goldwater did indeed win the nomination. Alas, he wound up getting clobbered by Democrat President Lyndon Johnson.
But this is where the conservative rise really begins. During the 1964 campaign, Goldwater’s supporters decided to show a televised speech by actor Ronald Reagan. The speech was called “A Time for Choosing” — and Reagan was a hit. So much of a hit that when Goldwater lost, a move to draft Reagan for governor of California two years later was on the move — and succeeded.
And, notably, right there in the mid-sixties, 1967 to be precise, The American Spectator — the publication you are now reading and led by the inimitable R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. came into being.
Long story short, the conservative movement became a considerable success, with Reagan “Reaganizing” the GOP, getting elected twice to the White House and bringing along with him a decidedly conservative Republican Party.
And in classic American style, all manner of conservative operatives and organizations followed in Reagan’s footsteps. Indeed, Reagan, today long gone, paved the way for conservative control of the GOP. And in today’s GOP world, that control rests in the hands of President Donald Trump. Trump, as president, has made a point of appointing conservatives to all manner of positions in the federal government, not to mention on the federal bench. The latter, notably, include Judges Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, all of whom were Trump Supreme Court nominees confirmed and are now in place on the highest court in the land.
So, taken all together, what does this mean? It means that as the country cruises into the 2026 midterm elections, the conservative movement will be out in force…
Notably, conservatives swarmed into the media, not only gaining voices in the so-called “mainstream media” but blossoming into new media that once upon a time simply did not exist. Leading that charge was the late Rush Limbaugh, who almost single-handedly led the popularity of what is known today as “talk radio.”
Media baron Rupert Murdoch jumped into the fray by creating Fox News. Then, down the road, came longtime conservative journalist Christopher Ruddy, who created Newsmax. Both a TV outlet and print magazine, Newsmax has itself become a conservative hit. (And yes, full disclosure, I am a Newsmax contributor.)
Taken all together, with the vigorous support of an energized conservative movement that today includes the American Conservative Union — led by Trump allies and decided conservatives Matt and Mercedes Schlapp — this era of American history is without question going to be recognized for both its staunch support of the conservative movement and the success of that movement moving forward. Indeed, as this is written, conversations have already begun as to who will carry the conservative banner in the 2028 presidential election.
And not to be forgotten is the blossoming of conservative media outlets on the Internet or in print. Indeed, the American Spectator, which you are reading at this moment, was one of the first conservative media outlets in print and now Internet form, founded by the decidedly energetic R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. Along with William F. Buckley’s National Review and The Washington Times, conservatism in print has become a considerable individual and collective success. (RELATED: Why the Best Conservative Is a Little Libertarian)
Which is to say, the conservative movement is on a roll. Whether it’s President Trump in the White House, various judges on the federal bench, not to mention a majority of members in the House and Senate and media outlets like the one you are reading, it is crystal clear that the conservative moment is eons away from its humble beginnings with the lonely voice of Senator Robert Taft.
So, taken all together, what does this mean? It means that as the country cruises into the 2026 midterm elections, the conservative movement will be out in force supporting this, that, or another conservative candidate for the various political offices at the federal, state, and local levels. Not to mention supporting the various hot ballot issues that inevitably surface in an election year. (RELATED: Why Republicans May Defy Midterm History)
All of which is to say that it’s now August. The midterm elections are approaching and gaining speed. American politics, with all of the activism and chaos that always brings, is now arriving.
And as I frequently say in this space: Buckle in.
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An all-time favorite whipping boy of the American Left is the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Most readers wouldn’t recognize the group by its proper acronym — HCUAA — but they certainly know the Left’s reordered, twisted acronym: the dread “HUAC.” That translates to the “House Un-American Committee.” Improperly rendered, yes, but the label has stuck. You can succeed at such propaganda when your ideology pervades the media, Hollywood, academia, the culture — what we at The American Spectator have long called the Kultursmog.
Note the cynical repackaging of the committee and its mission: The Left, and especially far-left communist organs such as the Daily Worker, attempted to recast this important committee of the U.S. House of Representatives as un-American itself. That was a rather audacious move by the comrades, given who they were, and what the committee was not. The fact is that HCUAA had been run by Democrats and Republicans alike throughout its existence — by solid, bipartisan congressmen. The Democrat chairs of the House Committee on Un-American Activities ran from Rep. Martin Dies (D-TX) in the 1930s, to Rep. Francis Walter (D-PA), to Rep. Richard Ichord (D-MO) in the 1970s.
No, dear progressive snowflake, “HUAC” wasn’t run by villainous Republican Joe McCarthy. Senator McCarthy was, uh, in the Senate — where, incidentally, he was often joined by stalwart anti-communist Democrats like John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Pat McCarran of Nevada, James Eastland of Mississippi, and Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, the latter two being anti-communist pillars on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and chair and vice chair of the outstanding Subcommittee on Internal Security. Those guys exposed countless self-proclaimed “progressives” as in fact closet communists. For this, they have never been forgiven by the Left and forever vilified by liberal historians.
Nonetheless, the task of “HUAC” was a noble one. It was charged with investigating extremist elements within the United States, whether they be fascists, communists, American sympathizers of Nazis (the German-American Bund), or American Bolsheviks. The committee members were tasked with defending America, and they thus wanted to know whether certain fifth-column elements were working to subvert the system from within. The American Left, of course, had no problem when the reviled “HUAC” was investigating closet Nazis, but as soon as the committee set its sights on Soviet supporters, well — hell’s bells — that was downright un-American!
And yet, what could be more un-American than, say, the oath sworn by members of the American Communist Party in the 1930s? It went like this: “I pledge myself to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious socialism. I pledge myself to remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.” This particular oath was issued in 1935, just as Joseph Stalin was ramping up his Great Terror that annihilated tens of millions.
Yes, that was the oath to which these American Stalinists swore their allegiance. They were loyal Soviet patriots, literally pledged by oath to defend socialism and the Soviet Union. As American Communist Party chief William Z. Foster candidly told Congress during his testimony in 1930, their flag was the red flag, not the stars and stripes. Sure, they might have been American citizens, but they certainly didn’t support America as conceived by the founding fathers. They wanted to replace the American system with a Soviet system. As Langston Hughes put it, “Put one more ‘S’ in the USA to make it Soviet. The USA when we take control will be the USSA.” Or as William Z. Foster called it, a “Soviet America.”
And yet, when these American Bolsheviks were called to testify before Congress on their pro-Soviet activities to subvert the American system — and were asked if they were now or had ever been a member of that Leninist-Stalinist party pledged to the USSR rather than the USA — what did they do? They wrapped themselves in the very American flag and U.S. Constitution that they secretly wanted to torch. They pleaded the First Amendment, and they pleaded the Fifth Amendment. The temerity of the whole thing was breathtaking, almost laughable if not so serious.
And yet — and yet — when a committee like “HUAC” called them out for being what they obviously were — which was un-American — they cried foul at the mere suggestion. Shouldn’t the accusation have been a badge of honor to these intrepid comrades?
All of which brings me to the American Left’s newest assemblage of un-Americans. It is the Democratic Socialists of America, which rightly bills itself “the largest socialist organization in the United States.” (RELATED: Yes, They’re Communists, and Yes, They’re Lying About It. For Now.)
I’ve followed the DSA and its members for years, writing about them consistently at The American Spectator. I’ve warned about their cynical strategy to take over the Democratic Party. For this, I was called paranoid, akin to what “HUAC” committee members were called by the Left back in the day. They and I alike, you see, saw a red under every bed. But in truth, all you needed to do was follow these people and see what they were saying. (RELATED: The Mamdani Model: More Socialist Mayors to Come)
To that end, a central figure who candidly spoke to this strategy was Justice Democrats founder Cenk Uygur, who said, “What we need to do is take over the Democratic Party. We’re going to primary all of the establishment Democrats ….  all vulnerable Democrats.” Collaborating with the DSA and its members-candidates, Uygur declared: “We want hundreds. We want to replace Congress.” He rightly noted that if they could elect to Congress a dozen or two individuals like Congressgirl Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, “People would freak the hell out.” (RELATED: The New Brownshirts?)
The enemy is inside the gates, armed with its ideas.
Uygur said that over 10 years ago, and now folks are indeed freaking the hell out. Today’s Democrats are no longer scoffing. They’re sweating. They’re screaming. That would include the cackling, screeching, ragin’ Cajun James Carville. “I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy,” Carville says of Hasan Piker — one of the comrades. “Now, I think that a majority — overwhelming majority of Democrats agree with me — but this idea that we’re going to seize the means of production and this — just go look at the DSA platform.” (RELATED: Zero Sympathy for the Democrats’ Political Death March)
Old Serpent Head Carville isn’t alone in his angst. He and traditional Democrats are looking at that DSA platform and are terrified at the very real prospect of DSA members hijacking their party with their socialist Trojan Horse. Actually, it isn’t even a Trojan Horse anymore. It’s out in the open, as are the Marxist sympathies and networks of the DSA’s leadership. (RELATED: The Communists Inside the DSA)
The enemy is inside the gates, armed with its ideas.
Speaking of which, it’s a self-evident truth that socialism, communism, and Marxism are antithetical to the ideals the American system was founded upon. Any reading of the writings of leading socialists, communists, and Marxists makes that plain as day. Take a mere few hours to read the very brief Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. It blatantly goes against everything the American founders believed. (RELATED: The Castroist Playbook Comes to America)
But if that wasn’t already obvious to everyday Americans at a theoretical level, the DSA is currently making it so obvious that a 5th-grader in an elementary school civics class can tell the difference. Today’s DSA members running for office as Democrats are openly calling for a radical restructuring of the American system. They’re not shy about it. Barack Obama was devious enough not to give details when he called for a “fundamental transformation” of the United States of America. But these people? They’re not hiding anything. They’re sharing their vision in media interviews with stunned reporters (including CNN reporters) and with slick pamphlets posted online with full transparency.
You’ve heard the comments from DSA members-turned-Democratic Party candidates like Francesca Hong or from DSA co-chair Megan Romer, calling for everything from replacing to cancelling to abolishing prisons, the police, Thanksgiving, the presidency, the U.S. Supreme Court, to, hell, Congress itself. If you’re looking for formal statements on the record, you need go no further than clicking the current program for the Democratic Socialists of America at its website. The PDF is 20 pages long and includes official positions that call for everything from eliminating the Department of Defense (dubbed the “Department of War”) to “fully abolishing the police and prison system” to “Abolish the Senate…. Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” (RELATED: You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics)
The DSA’s “program for ending capitalist oligarchy and creating a real democracy” includes demands for “public ownership of the largest corporations.”
And of course, being that these people are cultural-sexual-moral maniacs, their platform also includes such gems as a “socialist feminism” that “fights for queer liberation” and ends “patriarchal restrictions on abortion, childbirth and childraising, gender expression and transition.”
What can we say about these ideas? Obviously, they’re infantile — what our founder, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., once described as “wombistic leftism.” They’re idiotic — as moronic as their (and Zohran Mamdani’s) new-fangled “municipal socialism.” They’re many things. They are many troubling things. We could all lay out a litany of just how bad they are and why.
But for here, for now, it should suffice to say that these ideas — and those behind them — are quintessentially un-American. Yes, these people may be American citizens, but they are un-American. They are the Un-Americans.
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They’re multiplying like the typhus-infected rats in Los Angeles (see Thing #3), and it seems like each one is worse than the last. And it’s begun to turn into a parlor game of sorts. Or maybe a drinking game.
Who’s the biggest dunce out of these Democratic Socialists of America fruitcakes running and winning in the Democrat primaries around the country?
Every time you think you’ve got a winner, there’s something else which is even worse than what you thought. (RELATED: You Simply Cannot Give Power to Lunatics)
Zohran Mamdani’s crooked-as-hell government grocery stores, which, as it turns out, are going to an RFP so that some connected NGO is going to end up getting city money to put the bodegas out of business, would seem to make him the leader in the clubhouse. Except he’s not in the clubhouse at all. Mamdani is now taking up for squatters in New York after putting out a list of prime targets for squatting — namely, the pieds-à-terre he wants to tax the hell out of. (RELATED: New York’s Envy Tax)
He’s hard to beat. But then you watch the Islamist hate-fest Abdulrahman El-Sayed — yes, he’s going by Abdul so that he’s more relatable to the voters — and Hasan Piker put on in Michigan, and even Mamdani wasn’t that aggressively hostile to the country as founded.
For sheer comedy, you could go with Brian Romero, the rather flamboyant New York Assemblyman-elect from Queens who won a Democrat primary and awaits his six-figure salary without any particular means of income — and so he just set up a GoFundMe for people to bribe him in advance of his state checks’ arrival. All he raised was $1,000 before the adults came around to tell him that no, it doesn’t work that way.
There are so many of these weirdos. But so far, one of them is batting 1.000 for pristine undesirability.
1. I Gotta Go With Francesca Hong
I’m going to cheat a little, because I’m totally just stealing from The Daily Signal‘s Tony Kinnett here. But what Kinnett has put together as a collection of lowlights from this walking human defect is just too impressive not to put on display.

Really, Wisconsin?
Yes, Abdul El-Sayed is a grave threat to the future of our Republic and Michigan’s voters must — and I expect will — send him back to wherever it is he came from.
But this?
She’s not from some hostile alien culture. She’s Korean by ancestry, but Francesca Hong is pretty much All-American culturally. Which is to say she doesn’t represent some imperialistic, aggressive Third World belief system; at least not in totality. She’s not fresh off the boat like Zohran Mamdani or Sri Tandehar, whose political demise Tuesday night was the highlight of an otherwise pretty dim Michigan primary cycle.
Hong is DSA, to be sure, and that’s utterly disqualifying. But she’d be a domestic enemy who doesn’t come off as a proxy for a foreign enemy like El-Sayed or Darieliza Avila Chevalier — who isn’t Cuban but can’t really be distinguished from the Cuban communists who back the DSA — do. Instead, Hong is just stupid and crazy and evil. (RELATED: The Castroist Playbook Comes to America)
Watching her crawfishing away after having demanded we eliminate Thanksgiving dinner is absolutely Peak Cringe. Look at this and consider what these people have done to the idea that we’d hire competent people to run things in the public sector. Bear in mind this is somebody who’s trying to get elected governor and will almost certainly get her party’s nomination.

Democrat candidate for Wisconsin Governor Francesca Wong rolls back her calls to cancel Thanksgiving: “I don’t want to cancel it. I actually love it. I’m kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to holidays in general.” pic.twitter.com/z0YxdgQJwu
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) August 5, 2026

Cue Ron Burgundy…

And also, this, which…wow.

“My proximity to whiteness continues” and she’s talking about her Wasian son lmao pic.twitter.com/8vu0mJeVL9
— River Page (@river_is_nice) August 4, 2026

2. Bombs and Inaugurations in Colombia
Don’t discount the possibility of a civil war in South America, as this week’s inauguration of Colombia’s new conservative president isn’t meeting with a particularly peaceful transfer of power.
Hopefully that won’t happen, but president-elect Abelardo “El Tigre” de la Espriella, who’s a similar cat to Argentina’s Javier Milei and/or El Salvador’s Nayyib Bukele, was set to take the oath of office on Friday in Cali, which is not Colombia’s capital. De la Espriella is pushing an agenda to decentralize Colombia’s government; he says Bogotá, the capital, is getting too many resources, and as such he’s making a symbolic choice to swear in someplace else.
Except that’s dangerous…

Colombian National Police officers on Wednesday found and neutralized a bus loaded with nearly half a ton of explosives a few kilometers away from Cali — the city that will soon host the inauguration of conservative President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella.
According to authorities from Colombia’s outgoing government, a commander of the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist group is believed to be behind the explosives-loaded vehicle, with the intended goal of killing local civilians and law enforcement officials.
The Colombian newspaper El Colomiano reported that the explosives-laden bus was found by police officers on Wednesday. Initial investigations determined that the vehicle was bound for the city of Cali and was some 20 minutes away from reaching its destination. Explosive ordnance disposal technicians safely carried out a controlled neutralization of the bombs found in the vehicle, preventing any risk to the local population.
According to Caracol Radio, seven cylinders containing 420 kilograms of ammonium nitrate were found inside the bus. Additionally, the bus had been fitted with seven concealed launch ramps presumably intended to fire the explosives.
The detection of the bus occurred at a time when over 11,000 Colombian law enforcement officials are presently deployed in the city of Cali and surrounding areas to provide security for the upcoming August 7 inauguration of President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella.

De la Espriella’s predecessor, the communistic Gustavo Petro, had a policy of “total peace” with the FARC guerrillas. That policy won’t continue.
And while Petro isn’t exactly pushing a rebellion against the new president, he’s calling for civil disobedience and refusing to participate in the inauguration after El Tigre beat his candidate in the election back in June.
If something happens to de la Espriella, you could see a real mess erupt in that country. Of course, move a bullet a half an inch in Butler two years ago, and our own mess would have been a thousand times worse.
3. Rats and Typhus in L.A.
A common theme on this page is the Left’s refusal — we’re past the point of inability; with the kind of money these guys spend, they could do something about this stuff; it’s a straight refusal — to do the very basics of governance in the places they run. This is about as close to the apex of that refusal as you’ll ever get…
As Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass oversees the number of rebuilding permits awarded to transgender people and drag performers, other, less critical decisions are falling through the cracks.
Rats. Los Angeles has a rat problem. Not a rat problem like all big cities. Los Angeles rats are of a particular variety.
In addition to some of them being the size of cats and chewing on everything in sight, the rats are literally flea-bitten. And the fleas that chew on the rats carry the medieval disease typhus.
It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from a rat for the typhus-bearing fleas to land on a human in the densely populated city of Los Angeles. And that’s where Los Angeles has a medieval problem.
Fleas become infected when they feed on the blood of carrier animals. In urban settings, the primary reservoirs are rats, opossums, and stray cats. Once a flea contracts the bacteria, it carries it for the rest of its life. Unlike many vector-borne diseases, in which the disease is injected directly through saliva during a bite, typhus is primarily transmitted through flea feces, commonly known as “flea dirt.”
Flea-borne typhus does not spread directly from person to person. But when you have four million people living in close quarters and the little rascals; it’s nothing for a flea to leap from human to human, infecting them with the Rickettsia typhi bacteria.
“Since 2009, the number of flea-borne typhus cases in L.A. has increased by a staggering 2,300 percent,” write Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe in City Journal. “Last year, the county recorded more cases than at any point in its history.” 
Repeated typhus outbreaks in Tinseltown, and the former Venceremos Brigade communist in charge of the place won’t sweep out the homeless encampments because they make good vote farms. That isn’t stupid; it’s evil. I don’t know what else to say about it. (RELATED: California Fails to Deliver on Another Promise)
Hiring homeless bums as ratcatchers would be a medieval solution to this medieval problem, but I guess that would be far too entrepreneurial for Karen Bass. Maybe she can ask what tourists are still going to L.A. to each bring a cat on their next trip.
4. Kudos to Aaron Rodgers
He knew that the legacy corporate media would do everything they could to hide that utter outrage last week where Anthony Fauci took the Fifth some 111 times rather than answer any questions from the Senate Homeland Security Committee — something which is getting harder to do now that the committee has voted 8-5 to find Fauci in contempt of Congress. (RELATED: Anthony Fauci’s Fifth Amendment Strategy May Not End the Investigation)
And also, apparently, that they’ve got a download of everything which was on his government phone — and rumor has it that’s even worse than Fauci’s diary.
Still, the legacy corporate media desperately wanted to bury the Fauci story. You saw that abysmal sequence where CNN’s Dana Bash, who as much as anybody was a Lockdown Queen during the COVID fiasco, got taken to the woodshed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Bash was better than most, as they wouldn’t even talk about Fauci’s Fifth-Fest. (RELATED: Fifth Amendment Fauci’s Narcissism Destroyed Faith in Scientific Methodology)
So when ESPN’s Pat McAfee did his show in Pittsburgh and had Rodgers as a guest, the quarterback decided he’d derail the show and get all the attention he could for Fauci’s refusal to face the public.
This was masterful. And coming from Rodgers, who took so much abuse from the legacy corporate media for refusing to put that vaccine in his body, it was even sweeter. Benny Johnson does a nice setup before this video…

5. The Return of the Wizard Hat Guy
We did this last week not knowing there would be a sequel.
Well, there is. So to avoid being horribly remiss, the Wizard Hat Guy is back to close out this week’s 5QT.

 

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Staff, OpenTheBooks Investigators discovered the scheme by cross-referencing billing records against the clinics own logs. On the dates the rides were supposedly provided, patients had been…

Journalists are often firmer with Democrats before they win a primary election. Then, when facing off against a Republican in the general, they go soft on the Democrat and rough on the Republican. That’s already happening in the Michigan Senate race with Abdul el-Sayed vs. Mike Rogers. 

Image

Screenshot from X

It’s apparently racist for Republicans to say the name Abdulrahman Mohamed el-Sayed. But they put the whole name on screen when el-Sayed spoke at his college graduation in Ann Arbor. When conservatives said “Barack Hussein Obama,” the left mostly freaked out about that, too. Mehdi Hasan complained right out of the box: “his GOP opponent is already running ads featuring Osama bin Laden and 9/11. The Islamophobia over the next few months is gonna be vicious”. Funny, we’re not seeing the clip where Piker breaks out in profanity and says the Democrats who did not vote for Abdul are Islamophobic pieces of [poop]. NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck and MRC Senior Director Eric Scheiner joined the show to assess the post-primary media environment. Suddenly, el-Sayed’s interviews got softer. On CBS Mornings, there were questions were inviting him to explain how he will “sway Haley Stevens supporters,” “[w]hat is your message to” “members of the Democratic establishment,” and if he’d support Chuck Schumer as Senate Majority Leader. Duthiers framed as concerning the fact that Stevens “was obviously pro-Israel” whereas he was “very clear about pulling back the spending for countries like the state of Israel.” At least Vladimir Duthier suggested that was a “false choice, that foreign aid was a tiny part of the budget that wasn’t going to hurt spending on schools.On Morning Joe, co-host Willie Geist asked “Can you explain your position on foreign aid as it applies to Israel, but also more broadly?” Abdul expressed loathing of Israel regardless of its leader: “We’ve been talking about an illegal apartheid regime for a very, very long time, and that supersedes Netanyahu himself.” Even if he insisted Netanyahu is “bloodthirsty.” On CNN’s The Source, host Kaitlan Collins played criticism from Sen. John Fetterman: “He said that you need to renounce people like the leftwing streamer Hasan Piker, who was campaigning with you, who was out there in Michigan on Monday night, I believe last night as well. Um, do you have any plans to do that? His answer was just wacky: “I’m less focused on folks who are campaigning with me, more focused on the folks I’m campaigning to.” After a notorious 2020 tweet saying Thanksgiving is imperialism and should be canceled, socialist Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial frontrunner Francesca Hong is now claiming it’s her favorite holiday. Try keeping up with her hot takes. She trashed Valentine’s Day: “the worst of humanity comes out from folks ‘celebrating’ on another day capitalism tells you how to show love.” She also hates Halloween. And she doesn’t like fireworks into the night on July 4. Hong primary opponent David Crowley complained: “when people try to call me the establishment, I look at that as a slur, particularly as an African American candidate.” We concluded with the Worst Media Quote of the Week contenders. MS NOW host Lawrence O’Donnell adores Anthony Fauci: “And that led Rand Paul to turn his hearing room into the most disgraceful Stalinist tribunal the United States Senate has ever seen.” Rosie O’Donnell performed an anti-Trump song parody: “His approval rate is 30. His diaper’s always dirty, I think the guy’s insane. He ain’t no stable genius. Got a teeny tiny penis and he doesn’t have a brain.” Comedian D.L. Hughley found a Christlike politician: “This Muslim [Zohran Mamdani] is putting Christians to shame….There is more to say for a man that lifts the poor, that feeds the hungry, that employs the people who are unemployable, that walks among the people, than powerful white men who consort with a pedophile. Who’s the more Christlike?” Enjoy the podcast below. The audio is here.

  

The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud has estimated total fraud at $230 billion and has stopped $56 billion in fraudulent payments since its creation earlier in 2026. Vice President JD Vance, along with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson and advisor Stephen Miller, heads the task force and notes that the current figures represent only the most conservative estimates.
On Wednesday, August 5, Vance and fellow task force members held a roundtable at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to outline the task force’s recent findings. Vance detailed two primary directives the team plans to implement to fight “fraudsters” in the U.S.: passing legislation for improved federal data visibility and enacting “stiffer penalties for fraudsters.” 
Vance noted that one of the “weirdest and most difficult” challenges of working on the task force has been trying to penetrate “the black box that exists around certain state programs.” This lack of transparency impairs the federal government’s visibility into how tax dollars are spent on initiatives such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Although SNAP provides essential aid to low-income Americans, Vance highlighted that the program has become a huge target for fraud in recent days, including improper benefits disbursed to illegal immigrants. (RELATED: Targeting Food Stamp Fraud Is Good Politics and Policy)
Emphasizing the human impact of financial corruption, Ferguson stated in the roundtable that, “Fraud is not just about the big numbers … fraud hurts real people, by taking our hard-earned money out of our pockets and putting it into the hands of the most reprehensible people in this country.” Ferguson further explained that the results of this can be seen in real, physical ways, such as bad actors performing unnecessary surgeries on elderly patients and submitting improper claims to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for billions of dollars a year. 
Ferguson went on to state, “Data should be a requirement to participate in these programs,” pointing out that “data is the enemy of fraud.” He went on to explain that increased data visibility will enable AI tools to stop fraud before it happens, replacing the outdated “pay-and-chase” model. Ferguson added a warning for non-compliant states: “If they want to protect fraud more than they want to protect ordinary Americans, something really rotten is happening in that state.” (RELATED: The Inevitable Result of Government’s Addiction to Spending Other People’s Money)
Beyond preventative tools, the task force highlighted a historic lack of criminal punishment for egregious fraud. Across many federal programs, people who committed up to a million dollars in fraud were historically unlikely to face criminal charges or serve any prison time. To fix this, Vance stressed the importance of obtaining Congressional support and proper legislation to ensure the task force’s efforts endure across future presidential administrations. “God forbid you are going to have President El-Sayed in three years,” Vance remarked, “We don’t want him to undo all the incredible work we have been doing…taking out the fraudsters and saving the American people money.”
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A subject I feel is important to keep covering, despite the puzzling disinterest of the political and media class, is the extraordinary industrial growth that is occurring in the United States. There is effectively a massive “stimulus package” of spending going on, and best of all, it is being privately funded. For once, taxpayers are benefiting from this vast “shovel-ready” stimulus, unlike recent government stimulus spending endeavors, in which money was simply redistributed from taxpayers to favored recipients.
The industrial focus of this piece is the explosive growth in demand for natural gas turbines to produce electricity. This is heavily driven by the AI boom and the related construction frenzy of new, electricity-hungry data centers. (RELATED: Good News, Bad Reactions: The Logic of Financial Markets)
But first, it’s important to make clear that the industrial boom is not strictly related to AI and data centers. There is also massive re-shoring due to President Trump’s tariffs and America-first policies that are making the U.S. a manufacturing powerhouse again. As I pointed out in a recent Spectator piece titled, “Under the Radar of the ‘Doomcasting’ Media, There Is Massive Industrial Investment Occurring in the U.S.”

Pretty much every mass market auto manufacturer has announced major new U.S. plants.
There has been substantial year-over-year growth in trucking and rail shipments.
Companies such as Caterpillar that are involved in industrial construction are experiencing explosive growth that they can’t keep up with, resulting in a record backlog of orders.

Returning to gas turbines, the manufacturers of these highly sought electricity generators are also experiencing a record backlog, as orders are coming in much faster than they can be fulfilled. The world’s largest producer of turbines is Massachusetts-based GE Vernova, whose domestic products are made in South Carolina, with supporting plants in Schenectady, NY and other U.S. locations. Its gas turbine backlog has more than doubled in just one year’s time — from $55 million to $116 million.
Siemens Energy is another major gas turbine manufacturer. It too is seeing explosive growth for its turbines, with unit sales for the fiscal year ending Sep. 30, 2025 up approximately 94 percent from that of the prior year. Now into 2026, its backlog is at a record $76 billion. Many of Siemens’ products have been imported from Germany in recent years, but with tariffs in place, Siemens is aggressively expanding operations in the United States. As documented in a Politico piece from February, Siemens will be restarting a turbine manufacturing plant in North Carolina, and it will spend $1 billion to expand existing plants in Alabama, Texas, New York, and Florida. In addition, it’s building an all-new factory in Mississippi to produce various components. (RELATED: Reigniting the American Dream)
In the first months of his 2nd term, President Trump fired the TVA’s childishly naïve board members appointed by Joe Biden. They had sought to turn the TVA into a green energy utility powered by “renewables.” With adults now back in charge, and with rapidly growing demand for electricity, the TVA is seeking to aggressively ramp up its electricity production capacity. Burning natural gas is the cheapest and easiest way to bring new capacity on line, but with such strong demand for gas turbines, the lead time from a turbine’s order to its initial use is now at seven years, up from the historic turnaround of five years. (RELATED: Everyone Wants Affordable Energy. Nobody Wants to Cut the Ribbon.)
Much of the competition for gas turbines is from the data centers themselves. Despite the scare campaigns about data centers driving up local utility costs by soaking up a utility’s capacity, the larger ones are installing natural gas turbines to generate their own electricity. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Let’s You and Him Fight, Bernie)
Where there are manufacturers of large industrial products like gas turbines, there is necessarily a network of smaller manufacturers supplying them. Howmet Aerospace is the largest supplier of turbine blades and vanes, supplying GE Vernova, Siemens, and others. It manufactures these products at plants in Michigan, Virginia, Indiana, and Texas. It also has several other U.S. plants producing related items such as alloys and coatings. Howmet’s business is also experiencing record revenue, profit, and backlog. Howmet is just one of numerous examples.
All of this domestic industrial production has to be shipped. And shipping is seeing very strong growth too. In a Freightwaves piece from last month titled “No Holiday for Booming Rail Freight,” the weekly snapshot of rail volume was up 8.7 percent year-over-year, with intermodal trailer and container volume up 12.9 percent.
There is much more industrial activity that is part of this economic cascade. Where data centers are installing gas turbines, they must also have a backup source of electricity. That source is overwhelmingly diesel generators. As documented in a recent article titled “The Data Center Boom is a Diesel Generator Boom,” the diesel generators are often more than just a backup, as they are used to smooth over voltage changes and short-term “speed to power.”
Again, the boom in diesel generator sales has created strong sales throughout the supplier network that goes into manufacturing generators. Similarly, industrial activity in the oil patch is robust, due in part to the increased demand for natural gas and diesel.
While analyzing the stock market is not something I would attempt to do, it is setting new records, and it bemuses me that the coverage of the current bull market seems to completely ignore the impact of the massive industrial buildout that is underway in this country.
We are experiencing what will likely be looked back on as the greatest industrial expansion since World War II. It far exceeds what any government-funded stimulus package could do. Prosperous economic times lie ahead with the USA becoming an industrial powerhouse again.
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SACRAMENTO — California’s biggest legislative battles are fought at the ballot box given our state’s freewheeling initiative process, which places make-or-break power in the hands of the attorney general. AGs write the titles and summaries of any measure that makes it to the statewide ballot. Those descriptions are the main — or only — information voters read before making their decision. As partisan politicians, AGs often write those descriptions to benefit their allies and hobble their foes.
The state is now in the midst of a battle over a Voter ID measure that voters will consider on the November ballot — so of course this time-tested AG tradition of putting their finger on the scales is front and center. AG Rob Bonta is a progressive Democrat who has battled various Voter ID proposals, so his latest changes to the ballot title have prompted understandable anger — and even a lawsuit — from the measure’s supporters.
Proposition 39 is a fairly modest proposal placed on the ballot through signature-gathering. Per the Legislative Analyst’s Office, it “requires voters to present government-issued identification” when voting in person. “When voting by mail, Proposition 39 requires voters to provide the last four digits of their selected government-issued identification number on the ballot envelope.”
As KPBS reported, Bonta’s office initially offered this description: “Establishes additional voter identification and citizenship verification requirements.” But in early July, “they changed that language to ‘Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification.’” That’s a startling difference, as the first explanation seems benign, whereas the second one sounds nefarious. It’s one thing to require additional voter identification and quite another to prohibit citizens from voting. Prop. 39 proponents have a solid complaint.
Meanwhile, leading legislative Democrats have sued the secretary of state for elements of proponents’ “vote yes” argument printed in the state’s official voting guide. Proponents claim the measure will make voting easier and that it will result in cost savings. Those lawmakers might be correct, as the measure does, on its face, impose new hurdles, however small, on voters. The LAO, which provides genuinely fair-minded analyses, pins the additional costs on local governments at “tens of millions of dollars to low hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Still, supporters and foes who make pro and con arguments should have more leeway than the AG, who writes the overall explanation. AGs, from our likely next governor Xavier Becerra to former Vice President Kamala Harris, were notorious for their alleged title-writing biases. Harris was accused of echoing labor-union talking points in a way that killed a 2014 pension-reform measure, for instance. Republican AGs have done so, as well, but it’s been 26 years since we had one of those.
California’s voting system is ripe for improvement, but the problem lies in our slow vote-counting.
I have no problem with narrowly tailored, state-based reforms that require voting identification — provided the measures don’t impose undue burdens on voters or are the cat’s paw for partisan shenanigans. Prop. 39 seems to conform to that standard and perhaps will, as supporters suggest, instill more confidence in California’s elections. I take umbrage at those who claim Voter ID will revive the California GOP’s electoral prospects, and others who cast aspersions on the state’s voting system mainly because they don’t understand how votes are tallied. (RELATED: What’s Happening in Los Angeles Is an Exercise in Brute-Force Politics)
California’s voting system is ripe for improvement, but the problem lies in our slow vote-counting. That can be fixed by, say, allowing registrars to start tabulating votes before the polls close on Election Day or changing deadlines so voters don’t have a full week after Election Day for their mail-in ballots to arrive. But that doesn’t mean registrars are stealing elections. (RELATED: The Indefatigable California Vote Factory)
A new scorecard by my R Street Institute colleague, governance fellow Chris McIsaac, found that our nation’s decentralized election system yields various levels of efficiency, but most states do a decent and fair job tabulating results. The lowest states scored a 3 out of 5 based on a variety of administrative standards, including their ability to accurately identify voters. California’s overall system received a middling 3.5, with its problems centered on the so-so way it maintains its lists — and its lacking voter-identification system. Prop. 39 could help raise our grade, but it should be up to the states — and not the feds — to tinker with their systems.
Seeing the Trump administration trying to meddle in state elections by accessing voter data is disturbing, given the partisan nature of the election comments made by the president. We wouldn’t want, say, the Biden administration sticking its fingers in local election counting. We shouldn’t want Republicans to do it, either. Per the report, state “differences strengthen the system … because they allow for experimentation and innovation that can either lead to new best practices or serve as cautionary tales on strategies to avoid.” Two cheers for federalism.
However, California really does need to do something about its most obvious case of election interference: those above-mentioned attorney generals who have a long history of meddling in initiative contests by unfairly describing the measures. If California really wants to boost faith in its elections, it should turn that power over to, say, the LAO or a panel of retired judges — but I somehow doubt that there’s any appetite in Sacramento to do so.
Whatever one thinks about Voter ID, it is well within the purview of the state’s voters to decide on such basic election matters. It would be an election-integrity-undermining travesty if a biased description were the deciding factor.
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Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

For the second time in the Trump presidency, the Right is debating the concept of the common good and how that concept fits within the American political tradition.
During Donald Trump’s first term, the “common good” debate raged because the unorthodox president’s nationalist instincts and policy prescriptions on issues such as trade and immigration clashed with the more globalist preferences of the Republican Party establishment. The debate is now raging once again, it seems, because JD Vance, the odds-on favorite to become the 2028 GOP presidential nominee, is seen as sympathetic to what might be called “common good conservatism” or “post-liberalism.”
And that impression of Vance is correct. I would know, because I have long traveled in many of these same circles. I weighed in heavily during these debates the first time around, even proposing a novel theory of constitutional interpretation called “common good originalism.”
But this second round of the “common good” debate has been less than edifying. On the anti-“common good” side, there have been way too many intellectual arsonists razing fields of straw men of their own making. And on the pro-“common good” side, there has been way too much inane trolling and stupid, low-IQ slop.
The common good is emphatically part of the American political tradition.
It is time to set the record straight about the common good. And the most obvious starting place is this: The common good is emphatically part of the American political tradition.
The Constitution’s Framers explicitly identified the common good as the very reason for the charter’s existence: The Preamble simply refers to the identical concepts of a “more perfect Union” and the “general Welfare.” In The Federalist No. 57, James Madison wrote that the “aim of every political constitution” should be the cultivation and elevation of “men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”
The common good refers to a collectively held good that is attainable only when the political entity’s citizens flourish in harmony with one another. It is a collective good that is greater than the sum of its parts. In politics, it is an aspirational goal — a statesman’s lodestar. Plato and Aristotle spoke of the common good. So too, for that matter, did the Bible. As God said to the Israelites assembled at Mount Sinai, “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
Unfortunately, the current idiotic discourse on the common good is doing a disservice to an important debate.
Many of the loudest conservative critics of the common good see in its invocation a rejection of individual liberty. But that’s a false choice. The Framers cherished liberty and saw it as one of the most important components of the common good. It’s just that there are other components too, like order and virtue. Some of the common good critics imagine the common good-ers to be closet monarchists or statists. But that too is rubbish: Madison, who more than anyone else was the father of our non-monarchist and non-statist Constitution, described the common good as the document’s very “aim.”
On the other hand, some of the common good’s purported champions have turned out to be their very worst enemies. On X, some ostensible common good-ers have clamored, especially in light of the recent migrant invasion of Spanish exclave Ceuta, for “Franco Friday.” That would be a reference to Francisco Franco, the 20th-century Spanish dictator. No American should be praising fascism, or any individual fascist, in the name of the “common good” — period. Nor can the “common good” justify whitewashing antisemitism or any other sort of overt discrimination.
The most frustrating part of this online slop-fest is that there is a real debate to be had here.
In trade policy, America has in recent decades veered too far on the side of globalism and consumerism, at the expense of production and supply chain resilience. In immigration policy, America has in recent decades veered too far on the side of openness, at the expense of civic solidarity and cultural cohesion. And in the culture war, America has in recent decades veered too far on the side of amoral, “live and let live”-style permissiveness — from marijuana to surrogacy to transgenderism, and beyond.
How to balance individual liberty and dignity with the common good is one of the oldest questions in politics. But here’s the thing: America’s Founding Fathers had it right. They nailed it. Conservatives should recognize that, instead of rewriting the Founding or stanning for dictators.
But in order to do that, we need a real debate first.
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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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Kids, this administration can’t even roll back a Biden Covid decision to let abortion pills go through the mail without an in-person doctor visit.