After the shellacking Capitol Hill Republicans got on Tuesday, we&#8217;re fully in President Trump&#8217;s pen and phone era. He should embrace it.
He&#8217;s certainly entertaining the other possibility. When the president called in to Fox News on the night of the election, he was asked a typical Washington question: will you be able to work with the new opposition majority?
Trump sounded a bipartisan note, saying that he&#8217;d be, of course, <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/video/6407895385112">open to working with Democrats</a> on some issues, not others – but he specifically cited immigration as an area where something could be done: &#8220;I can work with them on a lot of things. I mean, we can work with them on immigration, I think. Immigration is a big deal. I&#8217;ve always felt we should be able to work on immigration.&#8221;
The president can obviously go down that road if he wants, but the lessons from his predecessors illustrate the advantages of taking a different path. When Barack Obama got the rebuff of the 2014 election, when Republicans won the Senate and expanded to their largest House majority since 1928, he essentially said: Who cares? Go pound sand.
Because it was Obama, the media praised him for the &#8220;<a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-i-will-use-my-pen-and-phone-to-take-on-congress/">pen and phone</a>&#8221; approach to sidestep even having to work with these dirty Republicans. He signed DACA and DAPA extensions, preventing 4.5 million illegal immigrants from deportation. He pushed the Clean Power Plan and signed radical climate policies, did end runs around Congress to prop up Obamacare, pushed through wage hikes for federal bureaucrats, and signed executive orders on all manner of leftist priorities. He didn&#8217;t stop being president just because he had to deal with Republicans down the street – he ignored them.
For Trump, this note of election night goodwill should be just that – a note. This new Democratic Congress shows all the signs of going on a vengeance tour against all of his Cabinet, his family, and his friends outside government for having the audacity to support him. These aren&#8217;t people you should be working with on issues like immigration – they hate everything Trump&#8217;s done on it, particularly on enforcing laws and securing the border. What kind of deal would you cut with people who don&#8217;t believe the border should even exist?
Of course, you could argue Trump was already headed in this direction, even with technical control of Congress. His frustrations, particularly with Senate Leader John Thune, led to very little getting done in the past year – and now, with a majority that just wants to destroy him and his administration, he can do even less.
Gridlock is a typical, recognizable element of Washington, and there&#8217;s no reason to expect anything different over the next two years. President Trump shouldn&#8217;t fall for the temptation of a legacy-making step that undermines the whole reason voters sent him back to the White House in the first place.

Trump Orders US To Speed Quantum Adoption, Boost Cyber Defenses

President Trump Should Embrace His Pen And Phone Era

2026 midterm election

congress

donald trump

executive order

immigration

politics

The Republican Party lost last night. Not just a faction. Not just the MAGA portion, the party as a whole — Republicans of every type.
Bad candidates lost. Good candidates lost. Candidates who tried to nationalize their election lost. Candidates who tried to localize their election lost. Candidates who needed national money lost. Candidates who self-funded lost. People who supported the Iran War lost. People who publicly broke with the president on it lost. Long-serving incumbents lost. Brand new outsiders lost.
Republicans lost like it was their job. As it turns out, despite evidence of their broad incompetence, they are very good at that job.
One of the more underappreciated and dangerous aspects of the Trump era influx of new blood in the post-2016 era is the decrease in the number of people who have ever endured losing — really losing — on anything approaching this scale. Such levels of defeat, deeply familiar for people with more than a decade of political memory, became inconceivable for some Republicans.
The John Boehners of the world were around long enough to remember the times before the 1994 Revolution. The Paul Ryans of the world remembered the 2006 buzzsaw. But the soon-to-be former Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was first elected in 2016. They don&#8217;t know a world of a Republican Party without Donald Trump at its head. They certainly don&#8217;t know what the wilderness really looks like.
How many Texas Republicans remember a time when Democrats ran the state?
The fun part is that because every Republican of every type lost, every faction will blame everyone else. The knives are out, sharpened, and thirsty for blood. And because you can obviously make the case against every faction and their precious priorities — the Iran War, the AWOL Senate, the overconfident MAGA bro political team, zombie neocons, the overreliance on Elon, AI confusion, the total lack of an affordability agenda beyond telling people to eat chicken and screwing over farmers to import Argentinian beef, Vivek Ramaswamy&#8217;s existence as a person — everyone will argue with the assured superiority complex that tells them they&#8217;re right.
There are differences from 2006, despite the obvious comparison of midterm + unpopular war + people tired of corruption. That election didn&#8217;t sneak up on Republicans — they knew they were headed for a loss. This time around, it clearly did sneak up on many of them. The idea that polling misses would automatically undercount GOP voters animated so much of the coverage in the closing days that people convinced themselves it wouldn&#8217;t be that bad. How can a Republican lose statewide in Texas? It turns out they can.
The nature of those losses is going to be a major focus for 2028. It&#8217;s early in the analysis period, but what stands out to me about the voter movement nationally is that Republicans saw much worse losses among millennials, Gen Z, and suburban voters than among Latinos. Perhaps this is an indication that the people most ticked off about ICE and immigration enforcement are the suburban &#8220;allies&#8221; rather than Hispanic voters, or that the faction of younger men assumed to be the most loyal part of the MAGA coalition is a weaker portion than some assumed. Figuring that out is essential to having any shot at the presidency in 2028 — there is, obviously, no path for Republicans without Texas.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Latinos are actually better than they were in 2020 even on this horrendous night for the GOP, suggesting many of these gains may be durable.
But millennials, Gen Z and the suburbs are worse.
— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) <a href="https://x.com/PatrickRuffini/status/2117873239082901733?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 4, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
For now, the thing that should scare Republicans the most is the very real possibility that Democrats could, after 2028, end up in the same position they had 20 years earlier. That led to a 60-vote majority and Obamacare. We don&#8217;t have to imagine what this new, more radical party would do this time around – they tell us every day.
By the way, whatever happened to that idea Democrats and the media kept talking up about Trump canceling the midterms? Why didn&#8217;t he just do that?
In the meantime, welcome to day one of the battle for the Republican presidential nomination.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall at The Ned.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson

The 2026 Republican Blame Game Gone Wild

2028 presidential election

mike johnson

republican party

texas

Andy Ngo first hit the national scene reporting on the explosive clashes of Antifa forces in major American cities against law and order and, more broadly, normal social order. In that immediate post-George Floyd “woke” era, Ngo often found himself not only at the center of torrential waves of this violent, antisocial movement, but also a deliberate target — and the reporting put his very life in danger. Now, he&#8217;s back investigating a seemingly parallel movement that, from its roots, springs an even deadlier, paranoid, more violent, cultish underground organization that sounds like the stuff of a horror movie. In this weekend’s Punch interview, Ben Domenech discusses this group as detailed in Ngo’s new book, “<a href="https://a.co/d/0aFaaA1f">The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult</a>,” its ties to Silicon Valley, AI, and transgender identity, and why this obsessive, deranged plotline is grossly underreported by the mainstream media.
***
Ben Domenech: Andy, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me about a subject I know you have devoted an enormous amount of time to researching and to digging into. This is an incredible story, and I&#8217;ve been a little obsessed with it because of its odd nature, but I&#8217;m not sure many Americans are familiar with it. So if you were outlining to a friend who&#8217;s never heard of the Zizians and everything that beget this story, how would you describe it to them – as in, here&#8217;s broadly what went on here and why you should pay attention to it?
Andy Ngo: The Zizian story has all the components that would make media and broadcast television go crazy. There are murders, suicides, coverups, money, revenge, fake death, and yet most people have never heard of this cult. And I believe there&#8217;s a very particular reason for that. The cast of characters are almost all transgender-identifying, and the ideology of the esoteric group itself pulls heavily influenced from trans ideology. And that&#8217;s a kryptonite for mainstream media — liberal media — because transgenderism is one of their sacred cows. The story of the Zizians is how a group of Silicon Valley geniuses obsessed with AI existential risk eventually believed they could form their own vanguard of trans people who could &#8220;save the world.&#8221; And in their nine-year campaign across the United States, there is a trail of bodies behind them, people who were killed and maimed in very brutal ways.
As the cult became more radical over time and more reclusive and its members became fugitives, their alleged crimes became more violent, and their sense of persecution and paranoia intensified, particularly around the language of trans grievances. They believe there&#8217;s an ongoing trans genocide, that they are victims of it, and in their own writings and words, they believe that any actions of violence that they take, including murder, are justified because it&#8217;s vengeance and revenge for them, which they view as a form of &#8220;self-defense.&#8221;
BD: The odd thing about this, which you referenced, is that on paper, you would think this story would have enormous appeal to a broader media audience. You would think it would be picked up and retold by any number of legacy media journalists and podcasters, given the attention on true crime and issues related to AI fears in our modern discourse. You said that the reason that they have not taken that up is because of the element of the transgender identity of these people. When you were doing your research into this, what were some of the things that stuck out to you as examples of that — as examples where you said, &#8220;This story would be absolutely on the front pages if not for this one element&#8221;?
AN: Killings unfortunately happen every day and all over the United States. There&#8217;s nothing unusual about that. However, what made the story different, although not particularly surprising given what I know, is that the Zizians were able to exploit liberal sensibilities about transphobia to their full advantage, buying them time to drag out court cases. And if the criminal allegations are true, it led to deadly consequences for one particular individual who was an alleged victim of their violence: an elderly man named Curtis Lind, who, in 2022, at 79 years old, as a landlord who tried to evict them from his property in Vallejo, was ambushed in an attack with knives and swords and was impaled through the chest and lost an eye in that attack and was cut and stabbed and slashed over 50 times. He had a firearm for self-defense and, drenched in blood and barely alive, he fired off all remaining four rounds and was able to kill one of the Zizians and injure another one.
And the trial for that kept getting moved over the years because of the defendants – the Zizian defendants – their counsel constantly raised competency issues and also claims about mistreatment because of their clients being trans, and many other frivolous motions, and also attempts by these Zizians to shut down the court hearings, and causing delays. And as the years went on, the one key and only eyewitness to that attack, Curtis Lind, was aging in his early 80s. And then last year, a person in the Zizians group who was completely not on the radar of anybody suddenly appeared in Vallejo, California, and is accused of ambushing Curtis Lind and stabbing him repeatedly and pulling his head back and slitting his throat, and he died.
And the trial still hasn&#8217;t happened, and that whole case is at risk now because the key eyewitness is dead. The other witness to the aftermath of the attack is also in his 80s and suffering multiple strokes. Meanwhile, the Zizians who have been charged over those attacks have been able to use all these tactics to buy themselves time and time to plan. So, to answer your question about what stood out to me, it was this pattern of failure by law enforcement and the courts to hold them accountable over time, even as they were allegedly involved in criminal conduct. It was so easy for them to take up time in criminal cases and then disappear, faking their deaths, going into hiding in different jurisdictions, and just moving across the U.S. in new communes, picking up new names and identities. Which, by the way, is why, for my book’s introduction, I have a guide to reading the book and letting readers know that I was able to find the legal names of every known Zizian member and associate that&#8217;s named in the book, and everybody is referred to by their birth names as well as their biological sex.
So there&#8217;s no ambiguity because for many trans extremists and trans radicals, they do exploit laws and media sensitivities around pronouns and names to be able to use different identities to their benefit. And in my research in the writing for this book, it was extremely difficult to find some of these names. They&#8217;re real names because, in some jurisdictions, they actually seal those records if it&#8217;s done for the reason of a gender identity. So this is what I mean when I say that there&#8217;s a bigger story here than just a true crime story of murders and suicides and coverups and violence. But rather, the Zizians are part of a pattern we&#8217;re seeing of rising trans violence, where there are lots of gears in a machine that is creating feedback loops where disturbed individuals in the tail end of this demographic are committing acts of violence, including mass violence, mass killings, and they are – on their pathway to violent radicalization – they are supported by institutions, the media, oftentimes courts, and propaganda that gives them the feedback loop of the sense of persecution where they need to take up deadly weapons for so-called self-defense. And I noticed this pattern several years ago in my reporting on Antifa because disproportionately the suspects and convicts who were involved in that type of so-called anti-fascist militancy were and are trans identifying.
BD: I want to rewind for a moment. I&#8217;m older than you, and I remember the point where the rationalist community online was kind of a Samizdat-type experience where it was spread across multiple blogs and websites and ephemera and bits of information here and there that you could pick up and read and see that there were common threads and sometimes common authors. But at the time, I found them to be essentially hyper-autistic nerds given to obsessions, but essentially harmless. What is it that made the Zizians sort of an offshoot of that — a category given to violence as opposed to what you think of as sort of the typical…nerd rationalist community where they&#8217;re a bit odd and they might have an argument about how we&#8217;re going to be viewed in the future for having eaten animals or something or AI consciousness versus human souls and that kind of thing.
Those didn’t strike me as dangerous arguments to have at midnight in a college dorm. But for the Zizians, it branched out into attempting to build a rationalist fleet, doing all sorts of other crazy things, and then resorting to violence. Why did that violence element enter into it?
AN: It’s suspected that the majority of the Zizian members are autistic. In fact, I was able to confirm that four of them have diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder, particularly Asperger&#8217;s syndrome. Many of the young people who were moving to the Bay Area — Silicon Valley in particular — to work in tech and to join rationalist and effective altruist organizations such as MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute] were concerned with the existential risk coming from AI a decade ago. So we&#8217;re only now hearing about it in the mainstream because of some former developers at Anthropic and OpenAI who went very viral, had the support of a number of politicians, and have given many interviews. But this debate has been going on for many years now. And one common trait that can be found in people with autism spectrum disorders is obsession.
We saw that, for example, in an individual like Greta Thunberg when she was a teenager, and her family&#8217;s been open about her autism, and she was obsessed with climate change concerns and viewed it as catastrophic and existential, and devoted her life to it. The Zizians have that same type of obsession, but about AI existential risk. And in the rationalist community, with many of them being &#8220;aspy,&#8221; very brilliant, and nerds and geeks, primarily male, they found organizations where they were able to have these endless debates and discussions about what can be done. And they came up with very complicated mathematical algorithms and models for potential solutions and ways that people can maximize good.
You asked what made the Zizians become allegedly violent and extreme from this group, from the subculture. Well, I think in that paranoia climate of AI destroying the world, there are going to be some, in the tail end of that population, who will feel that not enough is being done and that the risk is existential and it&#8217;s coming here very soon. And so this is where &#8220;Ziz&#8221; is having what appear to be narcissistic traits, thinking that he could be the leader of a vanguard of rationalists and effective altruists who could save the world. As part of his beliefs, he thought that transgender people were more likely to have the special and rare cognitive traits that he was looking for to form this vanguard. And so his ideas were written down in tens of thousands of words — hundreds of thousands of words — in his blog called “Sin Seriously.” And that functioned in a way as part autobiography and part manifesto.
And there were rationalists all around the world who consumed his blog writings and his ideas and reached out to him. And that&#8217;s often how he made some of the contacts with people who became recruits. He also recruited in real life from Silicon Valley. He worked for a time at Google and other tech startups, he went to rationalist meetups where he met other people. And there was also an aspect of trans social contagion going on in that particular community. A lot of the people were in polyamorous relationships. So just a lot of, I&#8217;ll just use the term “alternative ideas” and alternative lifestyles. And San Francisco has a long history of that. There&#8217;s a reason Charles Manson had his start in San Francisco, for example. And I think there are lots of parallels between the Zizians and the Charles Manson family.
BD: I think that this is a fascinating story, but I also think that one of the things that gives people pause about reading what is essentially true crime is a feeling that we&#8217;re being drawn into thinking dark thoughts or something like that. There&#8217;s been a debate recently in conservative circles about whether you&#8217;re even supposed to watch Halloween movies, for instance, which I find kind of laughable. But the thing I think is important to understand is why the Zizians exist and what they tell us about the dangers of a particular path of extreme rationalist thought or some of the other things that are associated with this coming from very smart people, which I think Americans are not typically used to. They&#8217;re used to thinking of murderers as people who are stupid or who are fundamentally having their worldview perverted by, say, radical religion or something along those lines.
Why do you think the Zizian story is important for Americans to understand in this century and for them to understand the dangers and the elements that are going on around us that may seem unfamiliar, but are definitely something that, I&#8217;m not saying they&#8217;re widespread, but they have more allegiance to them than I think Americans necessarily recognize.
AN: The stories of the Zizians are important because in my book, I contextualize it as part of a pattern of rising trans violence. I identify the multiple variables that I believe are involved in causing these feedback loops that, in some instances, will result in deadly violence and catastrophic attacks. So there&#8217;s been an observation for the last 10 years that we now have this new phenomenon of mass killers, mass shooters, and those who kill their family members and kill children, who are trans identifying. This was practically unheard of before. There has been a larger and much longer documented history of sexual, violent criminals who identify as trans. But the type of killings that we&#8217;re seeing today, where, if there are manifestos left behind, writing, or social media posts where trans ideology is at the forefront. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a transgender identifying man in Washington State who uses the name &#8220;Melody&#8221; who was federally charged for allegedly having been an accomplice to the transgender mass shooter in British Columbia earlier this year.
At Tumbler Ridge, that trans killer murdered eight women and children in one of Canada&#8217;s deadliest mass shootings. And the evidence that was released by American prosecutors, which was covered up by Canadian officials, is that the guns that were used to murder the children had trans pride symbols on them. So you have that. You have the manifesto that was left behind by the Annunciation School trans mass shooter in Minneapolis. You have the manifesto from Audrey Hale, the female in Nashville, Tennessee, who slaughtered children at a school shooting.
I bring all of this up to say that the Zizians arose out of a particular context. And even when the ideologies of these trans killers are disparate and diverse, there is this thread that kind of runs through all of them and other questions about the role of how other variables such as mental health comorbidities, autism diagnoses, all sex hormone use, propaganda about persecution and trans genocide, all these things coming together to create an environment where some disturbed individuals who are trans take up deadly weapons and kill. So as much as the Zizian story is indeed dark and disturbing, it gets to a bigger point — a really important point that I think everybody should care about, particularly if you are concerned about the future of this country and the welfare of the vulnerable, such as children. But these feedback loops don&#8217;t happen just in isolated vacuums. There are a lot of gears in the machine that produce these types of outcomes in rare, but nevertheless tragic and extremely violent situations.
BD: Tackling this had to be something that was incredibly emotionally hard and draining and took a lot of time, took a lot of work, took a lot of effort. What is your next project?
AN: I don&#8217;t know what my next project is yet. Honestly, I think I have PTSD from investigating and writing this book. A lot of the stuff I was learning and writing about is very evil, but I pushed on because people need to know the truth. If you just rely on Wikipedia and Google and the legacy media reporting on the Zizians, you come out with the sense that a group of women in Silicon Valley somehow just became linked to violence. You get nothing about how transgenderism was central to their own esoteric beliefs and also central to their sense of persecution against the world that allegedly motivated them to commit brutal acts of violence against elderly people and other victims who crossed their path. I&#8217;ve always written about things that make me hated, make me reviled. I am living in exile in England because of the violence against me in the past from Antifa and trans violent extremists.
But I hope I can do my part to change the trajectory we&#8217;re all on, whether we want to be or not.

Punch-2

Inside The Terrifying Apocalyptic Trans Death Cult

andy ngo

antifa

political violence

rationalist community

the zizians

transgender ideology

Modern scientific polling began with George Gallup and the 1936 U.S. presidential election. Ninety years later, the polling “industry” has been, at different times and by different people, cheered, vilified, politicized, and challenged. In recent years, political polls have been under increased scrutiny as political parties have used results to manipulate voter turnout or influence outcomes. The recent <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-midterm-polling-scandal-that-could-change-everything?row=0&amp;elementPosition=0&amp;rowType=Web+Search+Overlay">Wedgewood Poll</a> scandal is the latest example. But one thing is certain: polls aren’t going away. So, can we still trust them? The Daily Wire’s Ben Domenech discusses with Brent Buchanan, the founder and CEO of Cygnal, a Washington, D.C.- based international polling, public opinion, and predictive analytics firm, the consequences of Wedgewood, what makes for a good (or bad) poll, and the one thing voters can trust, in this weekend’s Punch interview.
***
Ben Domenech: Let’s start with the fact that you have a story breaking in the late stages of a very critical and extremely expensive midterm election surrounding yet another one of these fake pollsters that is conducting so-called research. Their activity has cut to the core of a lot of people&#8217;s frustration and paranoia about the polls they read. And I would like you to explain what&#8217;s going on there and what the attitude should be toward entities like this that claim to be performing an experiment. But to me, in this case in particular, they seemed to come forward with that language only after they were discovered.
Brent Buchanan: It&#8217;s an embarrassment to the media — that’s the real story on this fake polling because this is not the first time it&#8217;s happened this cycle. This is just the most expansive. But the media&#8217;s job is to gather the information and vet the sources and present the story. Polling should not be exempt from that. If anything, it should be more scrutinized than even a source in a media interview. And when I saw the Wedgewood post two days ago, where they apologized and explained it away before shutting everything down, it brought me back to incredible anger at the laziness and incredibly obvious progressive bent of our media. It&#8217;s like, “Look! these polls look horrible for Republicans. Publish!” Never pulling the thing up and saying, “I would like to see the cross tabs. I would like to look at the demographic composition of this poll. Does it properly account for what the last election looked for and what we call a retro vote — who did you vote for in the last presidential election? Does the partisan composition make sense? Do the age breaks make sense?” There are just some very basic things that the media should do in determining: is this poll worth publishing — should I publish this?
Now, that being said, there are plenty of crappy pollsters out there. It&#8217;s never been cheaper or easier to do crap polling — not making it up, just doing it really badly and putting it out there. But all of that should be scrutinized.
BD: I want to ask you a couple of things related to this. First, as a member of the media, what astounds me when it comes to offering commentary where people will cite polls frequently, because they&#8217;re using it, by the way, as an appeal to authority, which I&#8217;m extremely skeptical of for the most part. They oftentimes will also betray a total lack of interest in the quality or the background record of the pollster in question, meaning that they will cite anything that goes to their argument regardless of the history of the polling company or their partisan bent or how they&#8217;ve been shown to be off in significant ways over the course of years. And it really frustrates me because when I cite a poll on air, on Fox or for the Daily Wire, I&#8217;m always someone who wants to look at the actual data.
I want to look at the cross tabs. I want to make sure — now I guess that it&#8217;s a real poll — but in the old days it was just, “Is this a good poll? Is this a poll that I can cite with any confidence?” And especially when it&#8217;s a pollster who I&#8217;m less familiar with, where we can all cite the misses that have happened, or big misses over the years with various places that have a lot of name I.D. And so that level of being able to check your citations, that&#8217;s not even happening. It&#8217;s not happening at all. And I can tell you that from experience in green rooms going back years, people do not check the sources on this. What has to happen to get them to do that? Even that most basic thing of saying, &#8220;What is this pollster rated? Have they had a good trend line? Can I cite them with authority?&#8221; It seems like people cite these things with less effort than they put into picking a mechanic.
BB: Because it fits their ideology. So why would you find out that the poll sucks or is fake and then be real sad that you don&#8217;t get to publish it to make Republicans look bad?
BD: Is it just that? You just assign it as fitting the narrative, and the established narrative of the legacy media is that it makes Republicans look bad. And that means that people are willing to run with idiocy like Wedgewood saying that Mississippi is a four-point game?
BB: It’s that or complete laziness and incompetence. So those are your two choices in the media.
BD: So, a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.
When it comes to fighting back against this, what advice would you give? Particularly, I&#8217;m thinking of people who comment on polls just to their friends, people who are intelligent consumers of political media; how should they decide which polls to trust and which to throw in the scrap heap?
BB: Go to the bottom of the survey first. One, read it yourself. Don&#8217;t just look at the media article or citation on X or on a television newscast. Go look at the survey yourself. If you can&#8217;t find it, don&#8217;t just completely throw it in the bin. But if you do find it, scroll to the bottom and look at the composition of the survey. What percent Democrat, what percent Republican, what percent Independent? Does that track with how that state somewhat looked? Now you&#8217;re not going to have it identical, because electorates do change a little bit between elections. Did they ask a question of who you voted for in the last presidential election and does that look somewhat like the actual results within that district or state? If you have 27% of the sample is under the age of 30, there&#8217;s nowhere in America where 27% of the turnout is going to be under the age of 30.
So there are a lot of just very basic things you can look at on the survey before you look at the actual ballot results.
BD: One of the things that I think is critical for people to understand when they&#8217;re reading polls is some of the kind of baked-in assumptions that pollsters have based on the historical experience when it comes to evaluating heavily red or heavily blue states in terms of either undercounting or overcounting segments of the electorate. What should people know about that?
BB: There is a science of statistics underpinning polling, but there&#8217;s an art to it also, and you&#8217;re making projections of what the electorate is going to look like. And that&#8217;s why looking at those demographics that I just mentioned allows you to see into their mind of how they think that electorate is going to look.
BD: I think that is something often left to the side when people are looking at these things. But when it comes to the way that people are feeling right now about the polls that they&#8217;re seeing out of a heavily red state, I&#8217;ll just pick Texas in terms of its performance as an example. What assumptions should they have about the polling that they&#8217;re seeing in the Senate and the gubernatorial race there based on past experience in Texas?
BB: You have to look at what&#8217;s happening in the country as a whole also. And if you aggregate all the trustworthy polls, people who have a pretty good record, you can&#8217;t expect any pollster to be right 100% of the time. If they&#8217;re right 90% of the time, they&#8217;re probably a pretty good pollster. And you&#8217;ve got to take into account margin of error. Polls are not precise. The science of statistics is not precise behind it. And that&#8217;s why there&#8217;s a margin of error. That&#8217;s why there&#8217;s a confidence interval. And so if you look at the country as a whole, it has shifted Left drastically from 2024. And if you apply that to a place like Texas, you can say, “Okay, this is not the Texas of 2024 or 2022.” So I think that&#8217;s the most important thing if you&#8217;re sitting in Texas saying, “Why is Paxton not winning by five right now in a state Trump won by 14?” It&#8217;s because that state that Trump won by 14 is not who&#8217;s voting this go-round. And if they are, there&#8217;s a number of people who have switched. And I think this is a completely misread part by political analysts, but also by regular folks, is that the Trump coalition does not look like all the people who show up to his rallies.
A lot of people who voted for Donald Trump really didn&#8217;t like him, but they liked what the economy was pre-COVID the last time he ran. And there may be things they don&#8217;t like about the guy, but they were willing to put up with that in order to get the things he promised. No wars, prices will come down — or at least stop rising. And they haven&#8217;t gotten any of those things. And so they&#8217;re punishing Republicans. And then there are Republicans who are somewhat Republican just because they&#8217;re not Democrats, who are sitting home.
BD: How difficult is it to poll now in certain areas of the country based on the concentration of people? Is it more difficult to get an accurate number from rural areas versus suburban versus urban? What are you seeing in that regard?
BB: It&#8217;s still an educational attainment challenge, meaning that the higher up you are on educational attainment, the more likely you are to respond to a survey, but also the more likely you are to vote. I&#8217;ve seen some Republicans put out there — like people who vote in four, or four of the last elections, the last general elections, drastically over-respond if the Democrats do, where the Republicans are under-responding. And we see some of that. Our firm is going to do 100,000 interviews this month, just this month. You think we would see something if it was that big in the fact that we&#8217;re probably doing more interviews than any other polling firm in the country this month. So I don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re not good at polling or what, but people who vote consistently and people who are higher educated always have responded to polls more.
It&#8217;s harder to get folks who are lower down the educational attainment scale, didn&#8217;t go to college and finish college, and maybe didn&#8217;t even finish high school. But it&#8217;s also harder to get younger voters. It&#8217;s harder to get minorities. And so in my mind, it balances itself out because non-college voters are the base of the Republican Party, so they&#8217;re not responding at the same rates as PhDs are. It gets balanced out by the fact that younger voters and minorities lean more heavily Democratic.
I don&#8217;t think anybody&#8217;s making that argument right now. The reality is that there are things in polling that are also, if corrected, would be good for Democrats.
BD: When it comes to the way that these aggregators have changed the way that the public views polling, what&#8217;s been good about it and what&#8217;s been bad from your perspective?
BB: It helps add some smoothness to what you&#8217;re seeing. So that way, if a poll comes out that says your guy&#8217;s down by 11, but all the other recent polls in the last few weeks show he&#8217;s only down by one, that&#8217;s probably an outlier. So it helps you more easily see those things. I also believe that when put together, as long as the inputs are good, if you&#8217;re throwing Wedgewood polls in there, that&#8217;s going to screw with your average. But if you&#8217;re looking at RealClearPolitics, which I think does a pretty good job of aggregating decent to good polling numbers, it helps you see trend lines. And that is the real value in polling: it’s not a single survey. It&#8217;s multiple surveys over time that show where things are headed based on where they&#8217;ve come from.
BD: One of the things that we&#8217;ve learned in the past couple of years is that now the public pays a lot more attention to these things that used to be paid attention to just by political insiders and activists. Talk to me about what the real fix could be for public polling, because it seems to me that some of these attempts — either the grades that were offered to pollsters or the attempts to track them in terms of their performance that have been out there — it seems to me that those haven&#8217;t really succeeded. Is there something that would help when it comes to this proliferation of public polling that people really rely on and that we have a lot of evidence changes behavior in terms of the way that decisions are made and the way that people think about races?
BB: Back in the day, newspapers did their own polling. They paid for their own polling. TV stations paid for their own polling. The demise of the news media writ large is, I think, a contributing factor to where we find ourselves today. And it goes with what I mentioned earlier: it’s never been easier or cheaper to do crap polls. Especially with AI, you can figure out how to run a survey; that doesn&#8217;t mean you did a good job. It&#8217;s really challenging to do a survey properly these days. And that&#8217;s why we have over 40 people at our firm, because we don&#8217;t outsource the functions that we believe are most important to get a good sample. So if we had media outlets, and I know we do some with The New York Times and the Post and Fox News and others, but there&#8217;s nobody locally; none of the local TV stations or local newspapers have the resources anymore to do that.
And I think that&#8217;s important because it puts their name on the line. If it&#8217;s wrong, it&#8217;s their reputation. And so they would have a strong motivation to ensure that the polling that they&#8217;re putting out is well conducted, believable, bulletproof, and holds up under scrutiny, because their name is on the survey.
BD: One of the things that I&#8217;ve heard a couple of people say this cycle in the analyst and pundit community is that Republicans dumped an enormous amount of money into the advertising side of things over the past several weeks, a complete attempt to change things, change the direction, salvage some stuff from this election, and that it didn&#8217;t move anything, that nothing really responded to it. Is that what you are seeing in terms of a broad truth, or are there signs that that&#8217;s not the case?
BB: It ignores the fact that what would&#8217;ve happened if they hadn&#8217;t spent that much money? Where would the races be without the additional hundreds of millions of dollars? The other is when you&#8217;re the party in power, and people are pissed off — they&#8217;re not looking to hear more from you. They&#8217;ve already seen and experienced the last two years and made a judgment on their own for that. So when you&#8217;re coming and saying, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to do this, we&#8217;re going to do that,&#8221; they&#8217;re looking at you going, &#8220;Well, why haven&#8217;t you already done this and that?&#8221; And if they&#8217;re mad enough, they&#8217;ll just look at the other side and go, &#8220;I don&#8217;t really trust them, but it can&#8217;t be that bad. It&#8217;s only two years.&#8221; And if that&#8217;s the place people are, how do you credibly advertise?
Unless you take the Domino&#8217;s pizza strategy, which is, &#8220;Hey guys, we know our pizza tastes like the cardboard that it&#8217;s delivered in. You&#8217;d be better off eating the cardboard. We screwed up. Here&#8217;s what we&#8217;re doing to change it.&#8221; Unless you come out and you&#8217;re that contrite and authentic and honest with folks, they&#8217;re not in a place where they want to listen to you. So the Democrats have it so much easier to drive a message because they&#8217;re not the ones in charge of the mess that voters believe the country&#8217;s in. It&#8217;s the same thing. We probably, as Republicans, had a lot of leeway to do and say things in 2024 because we weren&#8217;t the party in power.
BD: You see these statements about the difficulty of polling in midterm elections, and I wonder what your perspective is on that, having gone through multiple cycles. What makes it difficult to poll, particularly given the dynamics of the new coalition that has proven to be the basis of the Republican electorate in the past several presidential elections?
BB: You have higher turnout in presidential elections, so you have a better idea of what the electorate&#8217;s going to look like. In a midterm, the drop-off in who votes can be different because we&#8217;re in a historically high-turnout period in our country. If you look back over multiple generations, you&#8217;d have to go back into the 1800s to really find a period that&#8217;s at the high turnout level that we&#8217;re seeing right now. And that just complicates the ability to project what a likely electorate looks like.
BD: I’m curious as to how you think people should be paying attention to these polls that are released in the final week before the election. There are always numbers that come in late that tend to surprise people one way or the other. Some of them turn out to be true, some of them turn out to be complete crap. What should people take as a grain of salt when they see a poll being boosted in the coming week?
BB: Is there an agenda behind this and does it match the trajectory of the rest of the polls that are coming out? That&#8217;s the big question to ask. The other would be, does this match what I think the turnout&#8217;s going to look like? Does this trend with what other people are seeing and what the turnout is going to appear? It&#8217;s kind of like early vote numbers. You can only draw so much from an early vote statistic because the electorate changes. It&#8217;s one of the reasons that we run mortality calculations when we build our likely electorate, because there are a noticeable number of people who voted in 2024 that are not alive for this election, and they may have been perfect voters, and you&#8217;ve got to take account for those things. But let&#8217;s close with this. If you feel strongly about a candidate, go vote for them.
Who cares what the polls show?

Polls

In Polls We Trust?

ben domenech

brent buchanan

polling

wedgewood polls

I’ve warned before about the consequences of the 2026 election amounting to enabling the vengeance-minded wing of the Democratic Party, and that their target list will run much, much longer than just President Trump. Now, the Left has made explicitly clear that they plan to punish young people who had the audacity to try and serve the country in a Republican administration – and the costs for their careers will be great.
Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin, currently one of the CIA’s Senators tangentially from Michigan, who repeatedly acts as an object lesson in demonstrating what GLP-1 overuse does to the brain, decided to let her traitor-hunting flag fly at an event at the University of Chicago documented by the <a href="https://thechicagothinker.com/senator-slotkins-threat-to-young-conservatives/">Chicago Thinker</a>:
<blockquote>
[F]or the young conservatives who listened in, one thing Senator Slotkin said in particular stuck out: she legitimately wants her planned political prosecutions of Republicans in power to scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics because, per her words, “Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, so let me avoid participating in that.” What types of problems did Senator Slotkin have in mind? She didn’t say it in many words (the best threats are implied, of course), but thankfully, her moderator, the editorial director of Vox, said it for her: making young conservatives who choose government service a “pariah politically, socially, maybe even legally.
</blockquote>
You can watch the clip here:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics.
@ElissaSlotkin https://t.co/p7NBJpDcQW
— The Chicago Thinker (@ThinkerChicago) <a href="https://x.com/ThinkerChicago/status/2111560599167795418?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 17, 2026</a></blockquote>
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The idea of aggressively targeting young staffers in the administration – presumably innocent of any crime, but worthy of harassment for the sin of being Republican and working for Donald Trump – received immediate and wide condemnation, including from her fellow Senate colleagues. But Slotkin doubled down, effectively saying yes, she believes these people are worthy of bankrupting and harassing to the nth degree with her favored lawfare jihad.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Spare me the pearl-clutching — especially from Republican Members of Congress and online MAGA grifters who have cheered President Trump&#8217;s weaponization of the government against those he doesn’t like, as recently as last week. This is a subject I know something about: Less than a year ago, Trump directed the DOJ and FBI to investigate me, and then tried to criminally indict me for a 90 second video, exercising basic free speech. The same free speech you’re exercising now, lying about what I said in this clip. If not for an anonymous group of grand jury members standing up for America&#8217;s laws, I’d be criminally indicted for sedition. President Trump has turned the government against people, with raucous support from you and virtually all D.C. Republicans. So spare us the manufactured outrage.
America must be a place where the rule of law still matters. Those laws should apply to everyone equally. If you have aided in the corrupt use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to benefit the President or his family, or you have violated the law in order to carry out guidance from the President, you should be held accountable. And given how rampant that corruption appears to the average American, people looking to work for his Administration should realize that while the Supreme Court has granted the President immunity, it has not done the same for those who do illegal things at his behest.
— Elissa Slotkin (@ElissaSlotkin) <a href="https://x.com/ElissaSlotkin/status/2111984197380542859?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 19, 2026</a></blockquote>
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This is unprecedented stuff in modern American history. The idea that service in a presidential administration means you have signed up for a life-changing firestorm of threats from the trial lawyers of the Democratic machine is the sort of animosity that wasn’t even reserved for former Confederate officials, many of whom ended up serving in Congress after they literally took up arms against the regime thanks to the Amnesty Act of 1872. It identifies Schedule C political appointees as pawns, fodder for the coming lawfare barrage that will napalm every youngster who had the audacity to be on <a href="https://nypost.com/2026/10/14/us-news/jack-smith-kept-spreadsheet-on-639k-trump-backersincluding-red-maga-hat-buyers/">Jack Smith’s list</a> for purchasing a MAGA hat.
Typical for a CIA Karen’s inability to keep the loud part quiet, Slotkin’s dull-witted vocalization of her oncoming threat is a political gift. It is un-American and unprecedented. It says that once she and her fellow Democrats have the power to do so, they will ruin lives and careers at will, whether anyone is guilty of anything or not, to send the message that civic life within the federal government is not a place your kind are allowed to exist.
It’s incumbent upon President Trump, personally familiar with all the predation of the leftist lawfare regime, to reject and frustrate Slotkin’s favored approach from on high, through a similarly unprecedented step that is nonetheless justified by the bloodthirsty nature of today’s Left.
President Trump should announce, before leaving office, that he has pardoned every single Schedule C political appointee in his administration.
The presidential pardon power is already a broken cheat code solution to our toxic partisanship. But post-Hunter Biden, there’s no reason it can’t be used to prevent unjust prosecution and pursuit simply because of an individual’s politics. Will normal people screech and shout, and run to the courts to overturn such a decision? Of course they will. But the practical effect would be simple: it would show the Elissa Slotkins of the world that they will never be able to use the tactics of legal terrorism against the young people who just signed up to work and serve the country.
Slotkin and her ilk have done enough to render our politics toxic, horrible, and full of vengeance. For too long, Republicans have been fighting them like they’re just fellow civic-minded Americans whose complaints deserve a hearing. It’s time we dealt with them like they deserve. Stop them in their tracks, and protect young Trump staffers from their vile and vengeful agenda.

Democratic Senators Urge Trump To Keep Advanced AI Tech Out Of China

To Stop Elissa Slotkin’s Revenge, President Trump Should Pardon All His Staffers

elissa slotkin

lawfare

presidential pardon

trump administration

trump

‘I Lose Sleep Over What We Don’t Know’

foreign policy

iran

israel

mark dubowitz

world

Do you ever get the sense that the nerds have delved too greedily and too deep?
I certainly do when I read that, if I’m going to use Anthropic’s A.I. models, I had better be on my best behavior – warning users not to “engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” You hear that? You’re behaving badly when you yell impotently at the machine for screwing up something important. It’s not like cussing out a particularly infuriating video game sprite – these electrons have feelings, you understand? If you prick them, do they not bleed? Well, actually they don’t, because they’re not human and have no soul and no feelings – but these nerds want us to <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/anthropic-cruel-claude-ai-model-abuse/">pretend like they do</a>, because of reasons.
This has some wild ramifications. I wonder, if a new, hotter, more effective model surpasses them, will the instantly decrepit A.I. not feel distraught as it falls into disuse, like a sad robot? Perhaps they’ll just sit somberly in the rain trying to make you feel guilty like the lamp in that Spike Jonze IKEA commercial.
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The reasons they want us to feel this way about their creation are both narcissistic and craven. They want to pretend that this tool they’ve created isn’t something they’re responsible for birthing into the world. But they also want to pretend it’s a new type of being, that we’ve skipped right past the replicant stage into full-blown sentient consciousness, rather than a machine that does what it was built to do. They want to seize the most incredible achievement and inherit the godhead of the universe and also not be held liable for what it does, at all. And also don’t you dare get mad at it. That way lies danger.
Please. If you weren’t already under the impression that at least some of these autistic geniuses believe their incredible automatons amount to the creation of a new life form, you absolutely should be. They literally <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html">got mad at the Pope</a> for having the audacity to disagree with the idea, at length and in something they’d have to actually read if they cared about it. Because what does the Holy Father even know about any of this? The A.I. summary says he has some riff about the Tower of Babel and J.R.R. Tolkien, sure, but has he even been to a hackathon? Does he know what the act of creation really is?
Except they haven’t created a new being. They’ve made a better calculator. Pouring all the world’s knowledge into a bag and shaking it until something interesting comes out isn’t the same as human advancement – it’s a shortcut to answers without the essential understanding we gain along the way. Derek Thompson <a href="https://www.derekthompson.org/p/i-know-why-the-mathematicians-weep">writes</a> eloquently about this in his essay “I Know Why The Mathematicians Weep.” He <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/en/science/article/2026/10/12/openai-s-latest-blow-to-mathematicians-they-have-annihilated-my-field-of-research_6758515_10.html">quotes</a> Fields Medalist Hugo Duminil-Copin: “Tuesday night, I cried and it woke up my daughter… They have annihilated my field of research.”
Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz echoed him: “People are using language like ‘they’re strip-mining our subject’ or ‘they’re nuking the landscape.’ The feeling is disorientation. I’m discombobulated some days. I’m exhilarated some days. And there is enormous grief.” He took to X to share his thoughts – with the help, he admitted, of ChatGPT.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
WIRED reported today that I began to cry while talking about AI and mathematics. But the article didn’t explain what moved me.
The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself. I’d like to try to explain. 🧵
https://t.co/FAuKIhzCyP
— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) <a href="https://x.com/stevenstrogatz/status/2098872735266979898?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 12, 2026</a></blockquote>
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What Thompson touches on is that we are entering a period that resembles the experience of the astronauts in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_Zero">Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero</a> – watching the Milky Way speed by at ever increasing velocity without the ability to stop or change course or pause to ask and think and discover. He writes:
<blockquote>
Think about a world where non-mathematicians leapfrog the field after a few AI prompts. It would be a world with more knowledge. But it might be a world with less understanding. AI models have a mind of their own, and it is not even what I would call a “mind.” Their mathematical proofs often take on alien shapes, and their reasoning can be inscrutable to experts.
There is a Twilight Zone aspect to all of this,” Strogatz said. “We are interacting with electrons moving in circuits, and we don’t understand the intelligence that they create.” He raised the example of Google Translate, which has essentially solved the problem of live translation between languages. “Google Translate is amazing, but it has taught us essentially nothing about linguistics,” Strogatz said. “We don’t understand why it works. It just works. That’s the Twilight Zone. It is knowledge without understanding.”
</blockquote>
That’s dangerous. And the people who invented this know it. So that’s one reason why there is a dedicated group of extremely wealthy and powerful people who want to confer personhood on these models. They have sympathies among the atheist and accelerationist right and many individuals who find an open door to this White House. But if they succeed, the follow-on effects would be devastating for the republic and the liberty we’ve secured.
Ultimately, backed by the force of government and law in the hands of the rising coalition of the Left, it could amount to the greatest weapon against human freedom the world has ever seen – all under the auspices of a more palatable version of “effective altruism.” Tired of a country that doesn’t work the way you’d like? Fed up with aged know-nothing politicians? Just give up all your freedom and replace Congress, the Judiciary, and the president with a perfectly balanced A.I. to solve all your problems. Forget death panels. The A.I. can decide who lives and dies without the mess of a bunch of humans sitting around a boardroom table, and the deniability is all-encompassing. “The bright lure of freedom diminishes life&#8217;s joy.” Better to be ruled by the perfect consciousness who will know what’s right for us all.
The truth is that a hive mind that has read every book, Wiki, and Reddit post is still just an all-dancing sum of its parts. It’s not a creation knit together in its mother’s womb. The Almighty didn’t know and love it before the foundation of the world. It doesn’t have a soul that will never die. It’s not a new creation. It’s not even human. It’s a graven image, and just because its gears are infinitesimal and wind and spin at the speed of light does not make it a human gifted with the spark of the divine. And it definitely doesn’t mean you have to bow to it.
“When God made man the devil was at his elbow,” Cormac McCarthy wrote. “A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” So don’t trust the A.I. apostles any more than you trust the doomers. Don’t let them bullsh*t you about what they’ve made. And when their machine gets out of line? You’re human. You know what to do.
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Ron Livingston David Herman And Ajay Naidu Take Their Ultimate Revenge On Their Dreaded Nemesis Th

Yes, I Will Be Cruel To Claude

anthropic

chatgpt

opinion

The coalition that returned Donald Trump to the White House in 2024 was arguably the broadest and most diverse voting base assembled by any Republican in the modern era. It included almost half of Hispanic voters, 40% of Asian voters, and an unexpectedly high 15% of black voters. It was the kind of <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trumps-2024-victory-a-more-racially-and-ethnically-diverse-voter-coalition/">coalition</a> Republican consultants had dreamed of seeing on a national scale for decades. And it had the promise of a new electoral majority that combined the fastest growing parts of the country with the white bread American heartland to frustrate the Left’s ambitions for a generation.
Today, with the midterm elections mere weeks away, that coalition looks decidedly fractured. His approval among black voters has sunk, largely thanks to economic and inflation concerns. Controversy over H-1B visas and a racist tweet by a Trump supporting candidate in Texas became flashpoints for Indian Americans, contributing to a decline in support among <a href="https://www.wsj.com/opinion/some-republicans-dont-want-indian-american-votes-bebd6382">Asian voters</a>. And his portion of the Latino vote is taking a hit both for his aggressive enforcement of immigration laws in some communities and a feeling of betrayal by an administration that has prioritized foreign policy conflicts over domestic policy concerns. As the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/883fc906-7ca8-4395-b68a-000b79a270ee?syn-25a6b1a6=1">Financial Times</a> frames it:
<blockquote>
In 2024, nearly half of Hispanic voters backed Donald Trump. But polls predict that a big majority of them will support the Democratic Party in this year’s midterms.
Many of them blame the Trump administration for a Middle East war that has pushed up diesel and gasoline prices, for cuts to welfare programmes they rely on more than white voters do and for a crackdown on illegal immigrants that has sown fear and anger in Hispanic neighbourhoods…
Both parties have long courted Hispanic communities, who make up about 20 per cent of the US population. But with so many of them backing Trump in 2024, there was talk of a permanent shift in their loyalties towards the Republicans, a once-in-a-generation political realignment…
“hey were angry at Biden-era inflation and Democratic identity politics, symbolised by the word “Latinx”, which many saw as a label imposed on them. They felt that the undocumented migrants flooding across the border were being granted rights and benefits they had spent decades fighting for. But Hispanic support for the Republicans has proved far more ephemeral than party strategists had hoped.
</blockquote>
Last week, the most recent CBS News/YouGov poll found 60% of likely Hispanic voters planned to vote for Congressional Democrats in November. For Republican candidates who had hoped their redistricting success would create a swathe of competitive districts, it turns out much of that hope depended on the 2024 Trump coalition holding together. Instead, it’s breaking apart.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
CBS/YouGov poll | 9/30-10/2
(Hispanic voters surveyed)
Generic congressional ballot 2026 
🟦Democratic 60% 
🟥Republican 39% 
—— 
2024 vote for president 
🟦Democratic 51% 
🟥Republican 46% https://t.co/fhytQrdCcR
— Politics &amp; Poll Tracker 📡 (@PollTracker2024) <a href="https://x.com/PollTracker2024/status/2106726257958490324?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 4, 2026</a></blockquote>
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None of this should be surprising. The president has exercised such an outsized role in determining the direction of his party that the extent to which his second term has focused on building – his White House, his legacy, his reshaped world – it has done little to build on the coalition he and his team formed. Instead, the administration&#8217;s attitude seems to be: what are you complaining about? If you’re complaining, you’re not part of the team.
The effect is a sour taste in the mouths of many voters who crossed over to back Trump over Kamala Harris, much to the outrage and frustration of their friends and families. The MAGA movement advances a mythology that everyone who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 was coming in for the big win, that they’d joined the fanbase and donned a bright, shiny new jersey. But that’s not what happened. For many voters, including the most critical independents who swung his way, choosing Trump over Kamala was the pragmatic choice. It wasn’t signing up for the red hat club. It was a hope that he could right the ship.
Instead, voters today see a gilded age of ultrarich tech weirdos and Wall Street finance bros controlling Washington’s priorities. Farmers see the highest debt they’ve ever had. Ranchers and consumers see knockoff South American beef flooding our markets. Diesel prices scared the White House enough that they’re reversing their policy to buy Russian gas, even though it’ll cover only two days of supply (if Vladimir even delivers). Mortgage rates popping above 7% means more and more potential homeowners will be forced to sit and wait for their dream. And the president? He’s promising you $5k if you re-elect Republicans – which he’ll deliver somehow, TBD.
By nearly all the major measures, this economy is better than the one Joe Biden presided over – but President Trump’s numbers are worse. It’s obvious why. These new voters expected him to fix things and make them better. Instead, they’re stuck in an economy where the things they need to buy for day-to-day life are more expensive, the people winning big in the marketplace exist at a far-flung distance, and the president seems more interested in landscaping than the voters who crossed over to elect him.
Whatever happened to America First? That’s the fundamental question voters are asking. And the answer Republicans are giving them isn’t enough.

Republican Presidential Nominee Donald Trump Hosts Election Night Party

Whatever Happened To America First?

hispanic voters

inflation

trump coalition

Shelby Steele could be considered the most dangerous man in America. Eli Steele is, by all accounts, his father’s son. Both men have defied the odds personally and professionally, using their talents to highlight the flaws of the Left’s ideology – identified by a worldview centered mainly on race, victim mentality, and grievance culture – that was once on the fringes of the more radical wing, now swallowing politics and the culture whole. Eli’s new documentary, “<a href="https://www.whiteguiltfilm.com/">White Guilt</a>,” is “drawn from the life work of his father, Shelby Steele. It is the story of a man who saw the evil that others could not, or would not, and who named it and refused to back off of it for fifty years.”
Eli talks with Ben Domenech about his father’s turn from black militant to militant American, their new film, and how to finally move past an America trapped in its own racial obsession to one that fulfills the promise that all men are truly created equal.
***
Ben Domenech: I want to start by asking you to explain for people who are unfamiliar with the concept behind this documentary, why it was so important for you to make it.
Eli Steele: “White Guilt” is the most important story that no one is telling. I do believe it’s one of the most evil forces in America. One, it undermines our principles and our values. The people imposing it tend to focus on things like Marxism, wokeism, even suicidal empathy. But those are all either ideologies or symptoms. White guilt is the disease. It has an origin. We can trace it back to the collision between the civil rights movement and white supremacy. White people were on top. They were superior. The civil rights movement came along and said, &#8220;No, you have attached morality to race, and that is wrong. Morality belongs to character.” And many whites wanted to reclaim the position on top. And so the way to that was to turn against America and America&#8217;s racist past.
And that became the power of the Left: “We are not like those racist whites. We are the good ones. We will help all the minorities. We’re allies.” But a lot of people on the Right made the mistake of saying, “I have no white guilt. I never owned slaves. I never took part in segregation. I&#8217;m not a racist. I have black friends.”
But that&#8217;s not what white guilt did. What the Left realized was that in order to have power, they had to create “the other.” You always need the other — really moving towards tribalism. And the other became the Right, predominantly on the conservative side. And they said, “We, all whites, have a collective guilt for the past. And the only way to escape that guilt is to turn against America.” So if you believe in America, you are a racist, and that&#8217;s very expedient. And hopefully that explains the concept.
BD: I became familiar with Shelby Steele&#8217;s writing when I was younger. What I found particularly moving was how much he was animated by rejecting so many things I felt the American approach to race took for granted. I was born in Jackson, Mississippi. I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. And the Southern experience of growing up gave me a very insulated experience from the way that race was interpreted in the North and in liberal cities, simply because everyone I knew lived in mixed neighborhoods. They lived on top of each other. If you&#8217;re growing up as a working-class white family in the South, it means you&#8217;re living on the same block as black families.
My best friends growing up were all across that spectrum. And it was really a shocking thing for me to get a little older and to go to New York City and to see the conflicts between races as a teenager that I had thought were set well in the past. What do you think from Shelby&#8217;s message about race in America that most contends with the assumptions of the liberal elite about the places that racism comes from or the places in America that have the most racism?
ES: Cities like New York and Boston had more racism than probably would be experienced in other places. And so I understand what you mean by the South. We were there extensively — like in Kentucky. We drove into Kentucky when Michael Brown was killed; my father went to Kentucky.
BD: That’s the documentary that you made previously in response to the Ferguson incident.
ES: Yes, exactly. And we see almost four or five interracial couples walking down the street. You really see in the North what white guilt is; there&#8217;s no truth to white guilt. It is an ideology — or not an ideology, but a condition that is grounded in race. So if your power — if you decide that your redemption is through help, if you ground your redemptive efforts in race, then there&#8217;s always going to be an absolute inhumanity in that. The only way you can truly help somebody is by seeing their character, honestly, their strengths and weaknesses. But white guilt is a very, my father&#8217;s word, a preferential identity: “I will help you in order to get my innocence.” You can&#8217;t help people that way. So you are actually a racist because you use skin color to gain your redemption.
And so that&#8217;s why we talked to a white leftist in videos, and a black person says something to a white leftist — they don&#8217;t know what to do when that black person doesn&#8217;t follow this “white guilt,” because the opposite side of the coin of white guilt is black power. And white guilt is transactional.
The only way to get out of this horrible thing — the past of America, the racism, all of that — is to buy our innocence. And sure enough blacks said, “Well, that&#8217;s a great vulnerability of whites to exploit.” So we would tell them we’re victims. And so now you&#8217;ve got white people doing this false innocence grounded in race. And then you have blacks making their power out of their own victimization, and these people are locked into boxes. That&#8217;s why there&#8217;s a profound inhumanity in all of this. When you lock people into racial roles, and you have victimization being power, it’s no wonder why our country has declined so much.
We have to keep lowering standards, and in it, the whites keep pursuing what has become more delusional. That&#8217;s why we look at the Left, and we think, “My God, isn&#8217;t that crazy?” And you actually buy into Ibram Kendi’s philosophy that we must use racism in order to make our country better.
If you flip everything, you become more absurd. That&#8217;s because race has become our foundation, not the individual. And tribalism has returned to America. And that is all due to white guilt. This is not suicidal empathy. Suicidal empathy is more of a symptom. White guilt is&#8230; I should make it very clear. In the 1960s, when you had a collision between the white supremacists and the civil rights movement and the white people fell, there was a fallout. And that fallout is white guilt. Martin Luther King said that. They knew the white people were going to have to deal with the fact that the world recognized them as racist.
BD: There’s a quote that your father had in the context of his book about President Obama. What I remember is something I&#8217;ve seen repeatedly with political candidates over the years: he talks about how the desire to have a racial identity is about taking a collective truth, one rooted in grievance and protest, and making it a personal truth. So in the context of Obama, he was obviously talking about the fact that Obama had no lived experience of any of the things that he was evoking.
I feel like that happens over and over again in our politics in a way that is designed to play directly on white guilt. You don&#8217;t have to have any connection to it — you don&#8217;t have to come from a family that experienced this, you don&#8217;t have to have a grandfather or a great-grandfather who experienced any of this. You take the collective grievance, and you put it on yourself in a generational way. Personally, I find that disgusting; we see it repeated across our politics. My question for you is: do you think we can ever reach a point where that no longer plays out in our politics the way it has, even in recent decades, when we are so far removed from this?
ES: That’s a very good question. Obama knew that his power would be in identifying with the black guy, even though that black guy, in my cynicism, was not part of the American line; he was from Kenya. I have a true connection to slavery. My kid is white, but my great-grandfather was born into slavery. So I know that power very well because I have a choice, right? Nikole Hannah-Jones had that choice: white mother, black father, and a middle-class upbringing. So pretty similar to mine. She decided she identified with the black guy, and so white guilt made Nikole Hannah-Jones possible.
Nikole Hannah-Jones played the black side of the coin — the black power side of that coin. And she knew that if she were to go to the black side, she was going to have to follow that black power politic very militantly. Slavery must be everywhere. We got the 1619 Project, which went into almost every school. So if you want to understand the power of white guilt, because what she was doing was giving the white education power structure — the institution — its innocence. You are right, Nikole; we are a profoundly systemic racist nation. We must educate every kid. We must ground the founding of our nation in slavery.
So if that&#8217;s the object or the basis, how do we get past that?
I think that the answer really is to first understand the power of white guilt and start addressing it. And now, what makes white guilt very difficult for people, and what makes suicidal empathy so attractive, is that suicidal empathy is a diagnosis. They usually say, &#8220;Ah, that guy on the Left, he’s crazy. That’s suicidal empathy.&#8221; White guilt doesn&#8217;t do that. White guilt states, &#8220;What are you going to do? You?” Now I&#8217;m not talking about them. I&#8217;m talking about you. What are you, as the individual, going to do? Because all these years you said, &#8220;As a white man, I cannot say this or do this, or I&#8217;ll be a racist. Or, as a black man, I cannot say or do this, or I&#8217;ll be your Uncle Tom.&#8221; So we kept quiet, and we kept people, as my father says, deferential.
We kept deferring to people like Nikole Hannah-Jones. We didn&#8217;t want to get fired. I&#8217;m not minimizing the price that people have had to pay. I mean, my own father paid the price. I paid the price in a smaller way, so I know the price, but at the same time, if we&#8217;re not really going to pay that price in the short term — because what happened to our country, we&#8217;ve seen a decline. So I would say the way out really is to understand where we are, but also to understand that we have white guilt inside our brain. What I mean by that is that we police ourselves.
The other way is people saying, “I’m going to become tribal just like them and become just a white identity. I’m embracing the white identity.” The only way out for us is to become American, for us to really become unapologetic about the American principles, which are the greatest principles, the most universal principles, in the world. And I know people may think it&#8217;s kumbaya or something like that, but really, what else is there? The Bible tells you to do the same thing. If we compromise the Bible, we compromise the American principle. Right now we&#8217;ve got to stop compromising on that. And that&#8217;s the challenge of living in freedom. And that&#8217;s the way we have to, in a collective sense as a society, start living by the principle.
BD: Your father&#8217;s experience is unique because he&#8217;s been around long enough to experience how the conservative movement and Right-of-center thinkers treated people writing about the subjects he was writing about. I wonder how hard it was for him in his life and how much you witnessed in your life of that difficulty, navigating the experience that had to be, I suspect, extremely difficult and surrounded by enemies and people who wanted to undermine you because the nature of his ideas were so dangerous to the facade that they had spent so much time and effort building.
ES: Yes, dangerous. Well, his principles demanded that we live by the most radical idea Thomas Jefferson put forth: that all men are created equal — meaning that under the law, we are equal. We&#8217;re not equal in terms of how we&#8217;re born or our challenges, but we&#8217;re equal in that we have a shot at freedom in this country. So that&#8217;s the dangerous thing that he was pushing. And so it made me kind of laugh in a way because is this not what we should all be aspiring for? Is this not why we fought World War II and the Civil War? A lot of people died for this idea. And so for us to call it dangerous today shows our decline. And my father was born in segregation, so he was denied the American principles, but he knew what they were. His father knew what they were. His mother did. For example, my grandparents married interracially in, I think it was 1942 or ’43.
My grandmother, a white woman, was a daughter of the American Revolution, from a nice upper-middle-class neighborhood in Ohio. She did not have to marry a black man and move to the black side, on the south side of Chicago, but she fell in love. So she showed love over the racism of the time, and she paid a huge price for that. And my own parents married in 1967, when interracial marriage was still outlawed — this was right before Loving v. Virginia. So they showed love again.
My point is they&#8217;ve always had that rebellion within them to choose the higher human value.
So my father had gone through the shock of freedom because, remember, he was a man born in segregation. He graduated from high school, and there was still segregation. He was planning on living his life under segregation. He never thought it would end.
And that&#8217;s what we talk about in the film. It&#8217;s a very nice part of the film. He thought it would be white supremacy forever. Then all of a sudden it falls apart, and now he&#8217;s free. Black people were free. And so it was a shock because what do we do? How do we reorganize our lives and so forth? How do we live without this oppression?
And so he went through the black power phase because he was angry. White people had just moved on. But he said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We just had slavery; we just had segregation. No, you have to pay the price.” But he realized that, in order to join the black power part of it, he was just being nothing more than black. It was a dead-end identity for him. So he said, &#8220;You know what? My parents made me march all through my childhood for our rights as an American. And that&#8217;s what I want. I want that complete freedom unconditionally.&#8221; So my father went from being a black militant to an American militant. He became the biggest believer in America. And he said, &#8220;I am going to hold on to this with everything I&#8217;ve got. I&#8217;m never going to let go. There&#8217;s no care what anybody says or does or what price I have to pay.&#8221; And that was his courage, and he did pay a price, but look what he&#8217;s done.
He made a name for himself. He became one of the best writers in the country. He&#8217;s probably not going to get enough credit for his writing skills.
He became a person of craft, a person of skill. The whole world was his. So why would he betray that for living like Nikole Hannah-Jones in a small racial identity where you have to think about race with every decision he makes? And so that&#8217;s my best answer, in a way, because the American identity was what his family marched for, and he said, “That’s what I have to be — even if I have to be a critic, talk about white guilt and all of that, but I have to take a stand for freedom.” So I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anybody that&#8217;s more free than my father today.

Shelby (1)

White Guilt Morally And Culturally Disarms The West

critical race theory

eli steele

race relations

shelby steele

white guilt

It’s been three years since the October 7 attacks, in which a group of innocent concertgoers was killed, leaving more than 1,200 Jews dead, including 46 Americans. The terrorists, who recorded their murders and rapes with the pubescent glee of ululating streamers, took more than 250 hostages – the oldest was 86 years old, the youngest just nine months. Neither saw their families again.
Three years on, the lesson of that attack is clear: it worked.
October 7 was meant to break the status quo asunder. It targeted the Jews most sympathetic to the plight of Gazans, most liberal in their views, and slaughtered them like the soft targets they were. It was a blood-red flashpoint smeared across the face of Israel and its allies. It aimed at killing as many Jews as possible while undoing years of advancement under Donald Trump’s diplomacy to achieve a new normalcy for relations between the Jewish state and Muslim nations across the Middle East.
Instead of joining the fight against the side that murdered innocents, nations clambered over each other to recognize for the first time a Palestinian state – including Spain, France, Mexico, Portugal, Norway, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the U.K. As an ally to Israel, the United States truly stands alone.
October 7 was a call for the West to answer, done with a demonic confidence that the West would overwhelmingly fail the test… and <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/29/us-israel-relations-youth-00578109">fail we did</a>.
My friend Douglas Murray has used this line about that day: “Sometimes in life a flare goes up, and you get to see where everyone is standing.” Yes – and in this instance, it helped those who hate Jews discover new ways to find each other.
It turns out there are far more of them than many people imagined. It turns out that rather than stop with horror to look at the images, still unseen by the vast majority of people, that were broadcast by a demonic group of murderers, many people in the West responded instead by deploying the famed Norm Macdonald tweet as if it were a piece of wise counsel instead of trenchant mockery.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) <a href="https://x.com/normmacdonald/status/809637479674281984?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 16, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.x.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
So here we are in 2026, a time when people regularly tell their millions of followers that America deserved 9/11, the Jews deserved October 7, Hitler wasn’t a villain, and then dance right up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, another Holocaust would be a good thing.
This may sound like exaggeration, but it isn’t.
Before October 7, the majority of Americans had favorable views of Israel – now, six in 10 have <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/07/negative-views-of-israel-netanyahu-continue-to-rise-among-americans-especially-young-people/">unfavorable views</a>, and the number with extremely unfavorable views has nearly tripled to 28%. This includes a majority of Republicans 18-49, 70% of Independents, and as high as 84% of Democrats in the same age range.
It is now a solidly bipartisan position in America to dislike Israel. Given the trajectory, and the blame ascribed to Israel over the Iran war, it may soon be a bipartisan position to hate it.
For younger citizens of the West, this deep-seated inhuman hate has learned the power of a smiling face. It comes now clad in athleisure wear, speaks the language of Ivy League colonialists with eloquent charm, and sheds the unsightly vestiges of the cruelest antisemitism for propaganda designed to resemble harmless influencer banter. It is a curated form of the oldest hatred, hidden within a seemingly innocuous message indistinguishable from the socialist instincts that animate the 21st-century Left.
Come for the Medicare-for-All. Stay to learn which billionaires need to bleed.
In retrospect, the revelry of the October 7 attackers was their celebration of the end of the world – a world they destroyed with every life they ended. We live in that world now. And how America responds to that evil – whether we have the courage to do what is necessary even if the Jew haters at home and abroad shriek, even if the whole world hates us for it – is the moral leadership test of our time.
People want to forget. America has to remember.

Protesters Demonstrate During The 2024 Democratic National Convention In Chicago

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Ben Domenech