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Thursday, July 16, 2026

WATCHING the ‘Salute to America 250’ festivities on this year’s Fourth of July holiday reminded me how much I love the United States for reasons too numerous to list here. Held on the National Mall in Washington DC, the ‘Salute’ was the signature national celebration held to mark America’s 250th birthday in the so-called Semiquincentennial. It featured some highly spirited musical performances by mostly military personnel, including a very respectable rendition of Village People’s YMCA by a naval officer in dress whites, a full symphony orchestra, some very talented young servicewomen singing contemporary pop songs, and a tenor (not military) doing considerable justice to Puccini’s magnificent aria Nessun Dorma from his final opera, Turandot. Maybe it was the brandy, but I even found myself oddly moved by an 83-year-old Lee Greenwood singing his own composition ‘God Bless the USA’, which I’ve never appreciated musically but whose lyrics expressing pride in being American, love of family, and honoring those brave men and women who have died defending freedom are more pertinent today than ever.

But the highlight of the evening was – it will come as no surprise to learn – the 40-minute speech given by the one and only President Donald J Trump, barely 24 hours after he delivered a similar speech in front of majestic Mount Rushmore to kick off the United States’ 250th Independence Day celebrations, in which he pledged that ‘the torch of America’s liberty will never go out’, an inspiring speech covered here in these pages. What a treat it was for an unsophisticated chap like me to hear a US president actually praising America and its extraordinary contributions to human civilisation! After years of doom and gloom with mega-rich celebrities trashing the nation while travelling abroad – who can forget Barack Obama’s excruciating ‘apology tour’ during his first year in office? – Trump’s positive remarks about this country’s past, present, and future must have acted as a tonic for millions of patriotic Americans hesitant to express their love of country. I know they did for me.

Unsurprisingly, the usual suspects have been quick to criticise both speeches for being too political, one going so far as to blaming him for ruining the July 4 celebration in Washington DC. To be sure, they would have found reasons to criticise even if he’d made no political references whatsoever. Such is the nature of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a seemingly incurable malady that deprives a sufferer of reason and the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction and that shows no signs of going away any time soon.

It is of course entirely possible that Trump’s critics have a point. They often do on minor issues, while studiously avoiding the larger picture, believing that the millions like me who voted for him did so because they thought him a paragon of good taste and moral rectitude. Would his words about American greatness and exceptionalism have been more effective had he left out references to specific legislation and the admittedly unwarranted lawfare that has been waged against him? I think the answer is yes, his words would have been more effective had he spoken more generally about what makes this extraordinary country so distinctive and pre-eminent in the history of the world. However, after hearing Trump call out the evils of ‘Cancel Culture’ and the very real threat of totalitarianism and ‘far-left fascism . . . in our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms’, threats to what he called ‘our magnificent liberty’, all is forgiven by at least one patriotic American.

But as I’ve said before in these pages, Trump is not all we’ve got, he’s what we’ve got. Besides, we’re at a point in this nation’s history when such quibbling seems a luxury. Without him this nation would have been lost with the likes of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. At present, there is no one else. Four years of Biden came close to destroying America, having caused possibly irreparable harm to the country. We simply cannot let this happen again.

Trump has already achieved much in his second term. But the forces of darkness – and readers of TCW know whereof I speak – remain in place and are just biding their time. The midterms are looming large on the horizon, and God only knows what will happen in 2028. Those of us who love this country and want to save it from those who seek to destroy it must not ignore the fact that the United States, Trump notwithstanding, continues to face the same existential crisis it has faced since, arguably, the 1960s.

Am I being alarmist in saying this? It’s certainly in my nature to be so. Anticipating the bailiff’s knock on the door is possibly a legacy of my Irish father. But we must not forget that much of the toxic madness that has befouled the developed world in recent decades – political correctness, DEI, anti-men and anti-family feminism, racialised identity politics, Black Lives Matter, the madness of gender ideology, and that latest nation-destroying blight known as wokeism, have been gestated at American universities. The men and women responsible for birthing this madness are still flourishing at all levels of American society. They continue to occupy positions of considerable power and influence.

Despite the emergence of the new rightward-leaning media, and Trump’s efforts to expose them, such people, and their sycophantic anchorites, retain their long-enjoyed and almost overwhelming monopoly over American culture, controlling the means whereby narratives are constructed, consumed, distributed, circulated and exchanged, to use words that would have sat well with Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci. They are united by two things: hatred of Trump and, increasingly, hatred of America.

Indeed, it needs to be emphasised that, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, patriotism and love of country can no longer be taken for granted among my fellow Americans. I must also stress that, among a certain class of people, invariably on the left, it has become almost fashionable to denigrate the United States and express shame for being American, mocking those among their fellow citizens who stand for the national anthem, place their right hands on their hearts during the Pledge of Allegiance, and hang American flags proudly outside their homes, the preponderance of the latter making some leftward-leaning elites feel unsafe.

Classicist and historian Victor Davis Hanson has compared Donald Trump to tragic heroes like ‘the angry and old but still fearsome Ajax’ from the Iliad. He also draws parallels between the deeply flawed Trump and the flawed heroes such as Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) in the iconic John Ford Western The Searchers, not to mention a long list of other films from Shane to High Noon. Being a lifelong aficionado of the Western, I hesitated to buy into this comparison when I first came across it in 2018, but am now convinced that Hanson has a point.

At this stage in his life and career, Trump cannot really be considered a tragic figure. He is, to be sure, a flawed individual, in keeping with those archetypes noted by Hanson. But his strengths far outweigh his weaknesses. Maybe the real tragedy associated with Trump is that so many of his detractors choose to ignore or are unable to see what he has done for the country and the world. Few if any will thank him for ridding Iran of nuclear weapons, or for securing the borders, lowering crime and inflation, attracting investment and jobs to the US, protecting the American labour force through tariffs, and raising the morale of the military, to name but a few of his achievements; but they will benefit from the results.

Allow me to finish by citing the great Kathy Gyngell, my friend and editor, when she said that America’s ‘achievements and freedom hang in the balance . . . Trump has ridden to the rescue, but if the revolutionaries and anti-Trumpists get their way . . .’ a quarter-century quest for liberty will have been wasted.

Trump is not a perfect vessel, but without him and for what he stands the West is lost. We had better realise that before it’s too late.

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/my-salute-to-donald-trump-flaws-and-all/

Mamdani Bum-Rushes NYC Voters Into Their 'FO' Phase

Mamdani Bum-Rushes NYC Voters Into Their 'FO' Phase

Stephen Kruiser

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. The Sine Qua Non Sequitur is resting after some bacon-related intensity whilst watching last night's Home Run Derby.

If we have any new readers here today, I should probably mention that I use the words "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably. That's because they are, you know, interchangeable.

One of the things that I found so disturbing about Zohran Mamdani when I first learned about him was his age. Perhaps moreso than any other decade, the thirties are filled with wildly varying degrees of maturity. Some people hit their thirties and seem to leap straight to 50. Others still act like drunk 20-year-olds who just happen to have better stuff.

Mamdani struck me as being firmly entrenched in the latter group.

A commie infused with and fueled by ignorant youthful zeal is the worst kind of commie. Zohran Mamdani is the worst kind of commie. He's not keeping it a secret, either. There are days that I swear he's determined to prove that conservatives were right about him as quickly as he can.

Last week, my good friend and partner in thought crime Stephen Green wrote about the ever-increasing disgruntlement with Mamdani that residents of New York City. In his headline, Stephen wrote that Mamdani is "just getting started."

It's true. We are a little more than halfway through Comrade Mamdani's first year in office and the buyer's remorse is hitting a fever pitch. It began with the exodus of the wealthy people who Mamdani and his commie hordes are always railing against. It turns out that if you repeatedly tell people that you're coming after their money, they will take their money somewhere you can't find it.

Thanks to Mamdani, a lot of people who aren't millionaires or billionaires will soon be forced to leave because they can't afford to live there. This is from my Townhall colleague Joseph Chalfant:

Under the leadership of race-communist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, rent in Manhattan has risen to an all-time high of $5,295 a month, representing a nearly 10 percent increase year-over-year.

That's right, the most expensive U.S. city to live in just took an insane leap upward. There should be a lot more space for squatters opening up, which is always a classic sign that socialism is "working."

This is a good time to remind ourselves that New York City mayors can't be impeached. The child locks are on while Manhattan residents are in the back seat of the Commiemobile for this bumpy ride.

Even those who feel nothing but disdain for New York City shouldn't want to see it deliberately destroyed by a gleefully anti-American commie freak. Well, mostly destroyed. As I wrote back in April, the city will probably survive, but it might not want to. I happen to love New York, and have a lot of great personal and professional memories from over the years. Just on a personal level, I worry that everything there will be ruined for me the way that it has been in Los Angeles.

Seriously, everything that these people touch turns into a fetid cesspool of awful.

Voters in New York are no doubt already realizing that taking a walk on the Democratic Socialist Party wild side wasn't a good idea. Now they have to stand by and see how much damage Mamdani can do with almost a full term still left ahead of him.

Hey, maybe they'll get lucky and he'll resign to run for president in two years.

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2026/07/13/the-morning-briefing-mamdani-bum-rushes-nyc-voters-into-their-fo-phase-n4954981/?utm_campaign=nl_pm&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pjmediambvip

Mad (at) Men: TV Advertising Goes Off the Rails

Mad (at) Men: TV Advertising Goes Off the Rails

Ed Driscoll

On X (formerly Twitter), the actor Kevin Sorbo, best known for playing Hercules in the mid-1990s, recently posted a commercial from that era:

Sorbo wrote, “Few things will radicalize you more than seeing what the world looked like 30 years ago.”

Fair enough, but these images are not “what the world looked like 30 years ago.” They’re a tightly curated and edited series of film clips designed to boost the sales of disposable razor blades to 1990s-era men. But they do say a lot about what large corporations and the firms they hired to create their commercials thought about their potential customers, and how to reach them. For Gillette, those customers were young men.

As 2026-era Gillette is hoping you’ll forget, by 2019, with the #metoo movement still in vogue, Gillette’s corporate overlords had a very different opinion of their customers:

This worldview among the establishment left reached a peak during Kamala Harris’s stillborn presidential bid, as Don Surber wrote at his Substack in October of 2024, in a column titled, “Gillette, Bud Light, Kamala:”

Women are 50% more likely to get into college and men are 9 times as likely to be in prison. The media and the government repeatedly try to emasculate men as they want to turn us into drones for these queen bees. The gender gap merely shines light on the problem.
After decades of this stereotyping of men as evil and the constant discrimination against men, males have had it. The backlash may have begun with Hillary but it later torched Gillette, which launched a ridiculous ad campaign on attacking toxic masculinity.
On January 15, 2019, Forbes gushed, “As Gillette has come under increasing competition from low priced competitors such as Dollar Shave Club and Harry's, along with a resurgent Schick who is offering refill cartridges that fit Gillette razors, its market share has dropped from 70% to 50% over the past decade. Gillette has been forced to drop the price of its razors by about 15% over the past few years and is on the verge of losing master brand status.
“It is within this competitive context that Gillette debuted its ‘We Believe in the Best in Men’ ad campaign on its website yesterday, part of an overall shift to the slightly modified tag ‘The Best a Man Can Be.’ The 1:48 length video starts out with images of remarkably troubled looking men as a narrator makes reference to bullying, sexual harassment, and toxic masculinity. It then poses the question ‘Is This the Best a Man Can Get?’ The viewer then sees depictions of a series of very ugly and negative behaviors, including bullying, fighting, sexual harassment, and blatantly interfering with a woman speaking in the workplace. The ad goes on to state it is time for men to stop making excuses and to renounce the idea that ‘boys will be boys.’ Gillette concludes that by calling for and showing images of men holding other men accountable and emphasizing that the boys of today will be the men of tomorrow.”
I saw the ad, blinked twice, and threw all my razors into the trash.

In 2019, Glenn Reynolds of PJ Mdeia’s sister-site Instapundit.com responded to Gillette’s ad by noting that the real reason Gillette’s ad “really struck a nerve is this: Men are used to being treated badly on TV shows and in ads, because women control most discretionary spending. But now men are even being treated badly in ads for the products they themselves buy. Advertisers thinking they can get away with that is a pretty open expression of contempt. And the contempt is being returned.”

Pushing back against the Cultural Revolution

2020’s color revolution and the Biden-Harris era were right around the corner. But several years before “the Great Awokening,” some men tried to push back against these toxic trends, which were prevalent back then, but were beginning to accelerate exponentially in the establishment left. In the introduction to his 2013 book, Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness, Eric Metaxas described writing his book in part to push back from the Vietnam/Watergate-era leftist mindset of “questioning authority.” He writes, “you could say that we’ve gone all the way from foolishly accepting all authority to foolishly rejecting all authority. We’ve gone from the extreme of being naive to the other extreme of being cynical. The golden mean, where we would question authority in order to determine whether it was legitimate, was passed by entirely. We have fled from one icy pole to the other, missing the equator altogether.”

Metaxas added that in his opinion, what makes a man great is a combination of being near or at the center of a historic moment, and the ability to affect that moment, along with “that of surrendering themselves to a higher purpose, of giving something away that they might have kept. All of them did this in one way or another. Doing this is noble and admirable, and it takes courage and it usually takes faith. Each of the seven men in this book have that quality.”

In “Raising Good Men,” her interview with Metaxas at National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez asked him about why he chose the historic figures he profiled, beginning with George Washington. Lopez asked, “Did anyone really need to write anything new about George Washington?”

METAXAS: I don’t write anything new, nor was that my goal. On the contrary, I only wanted to reiterate the basics, because I’m afraid most Americans aren’t really aware of those basics about him anymore. It was once de rigueur in our schools to teach his story, but as I say in the introduction to this book, that’s no longer the case and this is having a baleful effect. We’ve so focused on the negative things about him that we have forgotten how superlatively great he was and what tremendous sacrifices he made. Every American needs to know his story.
LOPEZ: What was your goal and what do you think you accomplished in Seven Men?
METAXAS: I wanted to begin a cultural conversation on what men are and what they ought to be. We’ve gotten so confused on this subject that we’ve shrunk from it, and that’s been tremendously unhealthy. And as part of beginning this conversation, I wanted to hold up the examples of these seven men whom I think worthy of general emulation. These were real men who faced monumental difficulties with courage and grace. We need to educate ourselves — and the new generation — with these stories. We used to do that. Plutarch’s Lives was popular for centuries. Bonhoeffer actually was reading it during his last days on this earth. We need heroes very desperately, and these seven men are a good place to start.

Given the pop culture of the last 30 years or so, men particularly need heroes today to push back against how they’re depicted on TV. In Seven Men, Metaxas wrote:

One of the most popular TV shows of the 1950s was called Father Knows Best. It was a sweet portrayal of a wonderful and in many ways typical American family. The father, played by Robert Young, was the unquestioned authority, but his authority was never harsh or domineering. His strength was a quiet strength. In fact, he was gentle and wise and kind and giving—so much so that just about everyone watching the show wished their dad could be more like that! But of course today we tend to see fathers depicted in the mainstream media either as dunces or as overbearing fools.

Madison Ave. Overdoses on Irony

Fast-forward to today; the last bastion of network destination television that many American men watch on a regular basis is the NFL. We want to watch the games live, which means having to sit through endless amounts of TV ads. And when they’re not being shamed by corporations that want to sell them disposable razor blades, in most TV commercials, men are invariably portrayed as dunces or fools, or both.

In part, that’s because, unlike the 1990s Gillette commercial seen at the start of this post, when they’re not hectoring men as Gillette did in 2019, modern TV commercials are absolutely saturated in the sort of irony that used to be the province of David Letterman in the 1980s. Merrill Markoe was Letterman’s companion for most of that decade, and the head writer on his show, who invented many of its most popular tropes. In 2015, she was asked by Salon.com about the style of irony that Letterman traded in, and if it had “filtered more deeply into comedy in specific and American culture in general.” She replied:

Yes. It’s frequently the language of advertising and corporate P.R. now. It is the voice of what [musician Andy Prieboy of the rock group Wall of Voodoo, her longtime companion] calls “Your buddy the corporation.” Everyone’s hip. Everyone’s ironic. Everyone who is selling you something wants you to know they have the same limitations and daily strife that you do. You definitely should be wary when you hear this voice now. It’s not to be trusted. Unless you’re in the market for an aluminum cookware set or an Apple watch.

Because of that need for irony, TV commercials are required to be jokey and edgy, but the only group they can make fun of are men, because the sponsors would be accused of being sexist and misogynistic otherwise.

This trend went into hyperdrive by 2023. When Bud Light self-immolated that year, it wasn’t just because of hiring Dylan Mulvaney to help sell the beer most associated with men; it was also the words that Alissa Heinerscheid, their then vice-president of advertising, said on a podcast in March of 2023:

“I’m a businesswoman, I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand there will be no future for Bud Light.’”
She also said, “We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
Two days later, she solved the problem of too many frat bros quaffing her beer. She signed Dylan Mulvaney up as a spokesman-pretending-to-be-a-spokeswoman and voila! No more frat bros hogging all the beer. Sales dropped and she became the FIRST WOMAN vice president of the brand to be fired.

As with Gillette, bashing your male customers and mocking them with a transvestite performance artist like Mulvaney is not a way to build your brand, which is why Heinerscheid was eventually shown the door. But the damage was done; “Bud Lighting” became a codeword for woke, virtue signaling executives dynamiting their brand’s sales into oblivion.

In Seven Men, Metaxas wrote:

[B]ecause men have sometimes used their strength selfishly, there has been a backlash against the whole idea of masculine strength. It has been seen—and portrayed—as something negative. If you buy into that idea, then you realize the only way to deal with it is to work against it, to try to weaken men, because whatever strength they have will be used to harm others. This leads to the emasculated idea of men. Strength is denigrated because it can be used for ill. So we live in a culture where strength is feared and where there is a sense that—to protect the weak—strength itself must be weakened. When this happens, the heroic and true nature of strength is much forgotten. It leads to a world of men who aren’t really men. Instead they are just two kinds of boys: boasting, loud-mouthed bullies or soft, emasculated pseudo-men. Women feel that they must be “empowered” and must never rely on men for strength. It’s a lot like a socialistic idea, where “power” and “strength” are redistributed—taken away from men and given to women, to even things out. Of course it doesn’t work that way. Everyone loses.
The knight in shining armor who does all he can to protect others, the gentleman who lays down his cloak or opens a door for a lady—these are Christian ideals of manliness. Jesus said that he who would lead must be the servant of all. It’s the biblical idea of servant leadership. The true leader gives himself to the people he leads. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. Jesus died for those he loves. That is God’s idea of strength and leadership and blessing. It’s something to be used in the service of others. So God’s idea of masculine strength gives us the idea of a chivalrous gentleman toward women, not a bully or someone who sees no difference between himself and them.

Those are all noble ideas; no wonder academia, advertising, and pop culture have worked extremely hard to make them anathema.

https://pjmedia.com/ed-driscoll/2026/07/13/mad-at-men-n4955003?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-JtzRF6MVkm&utm_term=&_nlid=JtzRF6MVkm&_nhids=ncjmMH94iyBYls

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

No Democrat Has the Brains or Courage to Not Be Crazy

No Democrat Has the Brains or Courage to Not Be Crazy

Kurt Schlichter |

No Democrat Has the Brains or Courage to Not Be Crazy — *AP Photo/Eric Gay*

There’s a big empty lane within Democrat politics, and unfortunately for the Democrats, no one seems to be smart or brave enough to merge into it. What’s that lane? It’s the “Not being completely crazy while also not being completely ancient” lane. It really is that simple. Someone could swoop into that electoral sweet spot, but so far, no one has seen fit to take the risk and fight the fight to capitalize—though they all do hate capitalism—on this tremendous opportunity. All they have to do is just act normal and not be a million years old to distinguish themselves and maybe win by appealing to normal people again.

That’s really all there is to it. Instead, they’re crowding the freak lane while leaving the normal lane empty. Several Democrats who were born after the Jurassic Age have danced around it, but none have committed. It’s apparently too much to ask that they not be complete Leftist freaks.

Let’s get the easy part out of the way, which is not being old. The Democrat Party is a gerontocracy. As we’ve seen, the boomer generation has clutched onto power, sucking the lifeblood of the young to keep themselves in office forever. U.S. Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi (CA-11), former president Joe Biden, U.S. Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters (CA-43), and many others—what do they have in common besides a relentless commitment to Moloch? They think Methuselah is a whippersnapper. Only now are they beginning to loosen their grip, and that’s simply because they’re literally too old to maintain it.

What you see now inside the Democrat Party is not so much a fight over ideology—as we’ll see, socialism has been the ideology of the Democrat Party for decades, and now they’re moving into full-scale communism. They’re just shy about telling the truth to the voters. The moderates are social democrats, and the social democrats are outright communists. There are almost no real moderates left, no Democrats of the kind you might have recognized from the 1990s.

What we hear about as an ideological fight is really nothing of the sort. They generally agree on the ideology, if not the labels. They were socialists a decade ago, but only now are any of them embracing the socialist label—the upstart young ‘uns are really communists, so they run one label behind. The socialist label is a branding exercise meant to distinguish the young progressives from the old progressives. It’s a fight between generations, not policy. They agree on the same policy. They hate America, they hate Americans, and they want to steal your money to give it to Third World peasants who will replace you and provide them with power forever.

That’s the Democrat platform, one totally committed to everything and anything that shafts normal people. Name a Democrat policy that actually helps normal people. You can’t. They talk about healthcare, but it’s their own healthcare policy they are complaining about—Obamacare. They like crime, and they like criminals, but they hate normal people protecting themselves with guns. They swoon over freaky perverts and want to inflict them on your daughters in locker rooms. They want to take your money and give it to people who shouldn’t be here in the first place. And they despise you—you’re racist and sexist and all those other things.

Understand that there’s no disagreement on this stuff among substantial numbers of Democrat politicos. The older generation agrees with it, but they cover it up better. The younger generation distinguishes itself from the older generation by trumpeting Marxism even louder to gain an advantage in the heavy blue districts where they tend to do better. But at the end of the day, it’s a matter of winning—they were both willing to eagerly endorse the rapey outhouse onanist with a Nazi tattoo and 500 other black marks on his résumé just to get some power, abandoning him only when it looked like he couldn’t pull it off at the polls.

There’s a huge space there for someone young who can also appeal to normal people. They tried that with Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and that shrill shrew from New Jersey, whose name escapes me at the moment. They ran on the “We’re just moderate moms!” platform, though Abigail was running next to a guy who touched himself like platinum in a toilet to the thought of murdering Republicans’ children. But once they got into power, they ruled like every other lefty. They didn’t even pretend. They’re one social media campaign away from passing a bill outlawing heterosexuality.

But what if a Democrat was actually normal? What about a Democrat who could say no to the most unpopular positions of the Democrat Party? Imagine a young Democrat who could be on the 80 side of at least a few 80/20 issues. It’s not like the Republicans are beloved. The GOP’s intermittent success is largely due to the Democrats’ failure. Bill Clinton pulled this off in 1992. He came out against crime. He came out against perpetual welfare cheats. He said he wanted to stand up for the people who “worked hard and played by the rules.” And he won.

Can you imagine any Democrat doing that today? They literally want to defund the police and close the prisons. They literally want to give free money to bums. And they literally don’t want people to play by the rules. Look how they moan when we deport illegal aliens. Bill Clinton won because he made it safe to vote for Democrats again because he was a Democrat who wasn’t going to cater to the deadbeats and who wasn’t going to let criminals run rampant. If you make people safe and secure and don’t insult them by stealing their money to give it to slobs who won’t work, you’re going to get a lot of leeway from the American people to do other liberal things. And they would let things slide, like Bill Clinton’s many, many trysts to ease the agonizing pain of being married to Hillary.

It’s the obvious flex for some Democrat to stand up and steal his playbook—or in Democrats’ terms, redistribute it. But none dare to. Like Spanberger, they dance around moderation, but it’s fake and performative, and in the end, they don’t commit. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Patrick Bateman of American politics, sort of looked like he was going to go that way for a while, but he didn’t have the guts to hold on through the inevitable heat he’d face. Maybe if he had, California wouldn’t be such a bubbling cesspool, but he doesn’t have the stones because you’re going to get stoned by the rest of the Democrat Party for doing it. Yet there’s a huge value to pulling off a Sister Souljah moment, another Bill Clinton play where he took on one of the more annoying people associated with his party, repudiated her, and ended up looking good to the normals.

U.S. Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17) was playing at that for a little while. He’s a pretty lefty guy, but he gave the impression that he didn’t hate normal people and that he might even be able to meet them halfway or more on some of the things they were concerned about. But it was too hard because to make that play, you’ve got to have the courage to resist the resistance, so Ro gave up and went more lefty than ever. What a mistake – you can never go left enough to satisfy the left. But if you go a little right, you have an opportunity with a huge swath of voters.

The obvious guy we thought might do it, the one we worried might do it, was Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro. It was insane that Kamala Harris passed over this very popular Pennsylvania governor for that weird mincing Minnesotan. But again, Kamala Harris couldn’t take the heat. She couldn’t get someone who was perceived as not a radical, and she certainly couldn’t get someone who was Jewish because, well, you know, the Democrats now hate the Jews and love the Palestinians now. But if she had gone for him, she might’ve actually pulled this off.

So that put Josh Shapiro in a very favorable position. He was the obvious guy to occupy the empty sane lane. His state adores him. In many ways, he’s been competent, and competent governing is not exactly something many Democrats can put on their CVs. Plus, the rejection by Kamala Harris and her humiliating defeat handed him the argument that Democrats needed to do something different and, conveniently, he was different.

The Democrats might’ve swallowed the whole Jewish thing if they thought they had a winner. But instead of differentiating himself from the most extreme leftists, he’s chosen to cater to them. That’s stupid in several ways. The first is that it’s never going to work. They’re never going to accept him as one of their own. He was too moderate, too effective, and too Jewish. His only play was to distinguish himself by doubling down on his moderate image. He needed to be an alternative because he was never going to satisfy the weirdos, losers, and mutations of the progressive wing whose Doc Martens he’s inexplicably chosen to lick.

So, instead of establishing himself as someone normal people across the country can look at and think, “Yeah, he’s not going to do anything stupid or crazy like let criminals out of jail or castrate my kids,” he’s donned the figurative P-hat of the resistance, whining about Trump and pulling a Spanberger by governing left. He’s as down with trans kids as Texas U.S. Senate Democrat nominee James Talarico. Just look at what happened on the Fourth of July—he refused to allow Pennsylvania to have a booth on the Mall. It took Senators Dave McCormick (R-PA) and John Fetterman (D-PA) (who is actually all alone in the young-and-normal lane of the Democrat Party) working together to make a booth happen. Shapiro shouldn’t have been petty; he should’ve been all over it as Mr. Post-Partisan Unity Guy instead of being just another Trump-hating jerk.

Apparently, his vaunted political skills are over-vaunted. Neither he nor almost anybody else can see the obvious. If you’re going to make an impact, you have to distinguish yourself. You can never be left-wing enough to distinguish yourself. There’s always someone who will out-commie you. So, you have to go the other way, which will, incidentally, lead to better outcomes and good governance, which will, in turn, create a virtuous circle. But of course, the Democrat Party is against virtue.

It’s also full of cowards. You’ve got to be brave to stand up to the fanatics. Senator Fetterman is. He’s the honey badger of the Democrat Party because he doesn’t give a Schumer whose paws he steps on. But somebody else who hasn’t been collecting Social Security for two decades could come along and not antagonize the left while focusing on solid, competent governing and true compromise with normal people. That guy could do very, very well in a general election, but it will be tough in the primary, and he’ll have to fight. He’s going to get a lot of grief, so he’s got to have stones. Too bad testosterone is far from the Democrats’ favorite drug, except when injected into confused teenage girls.

And that is why the lonely normal lane is going to remain wide open for now even as the Democrats crowd into the gridlocked kook lane. Don’t look for a maverick in 2028. They’ll need another electoral humiliation or two before they’re desperate enough to try not being complete idiots.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/07/13/no-democrat-has-the-brains-or-courage-to-not-be-crazy-n2679243

Footage of Ro Khanna's 'Violent' West Bank Detention Released. Notice Anything Wrong?

Footage of Ro Khanna's 'Violent' West Bank Detention Released. Notice Anything Wrong?

Matt Vespa

Footage of Ro Khanna's 'Violent' West Bank Detention Released. Notice Anything Wrong? — *AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki*

Last Wednesday, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) decided to take a page from Bowe Bergdahl’s book and get himself captured. It wasn’t the Taliban in this case, but Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Khanna went down a road that was closed to civilians, apparently with a camera crew and a New York Times reporter. It was the perfect setup for a political stunt, though one poorly executed that quickly fell apart like Swiss cheese.

He refused to meet with survivors of the October 7 attacks or attend a briefing on Israel’s border situation. He wanted to be captured in what he called some violent event. The footage was released. This ‘hostage’ video was as calm as Hindu cows are. The intent was clear: gin up anti-Israel hatred at home and declare a 2028 presidential bid. It’s a circus:

Even New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer torched Khanna:

Let’s be honest, this was a publicity stunt. Channels exist to protect elected officials, and Khanna intentionally entered a restricted, unstable area without coordinating to provoke a response.

What’s appalling is that Ro ignored requests to meet 10/7 survivors and hostages, or…
— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) July 13, 2026

Also, Israeli Ambassador Michael Leiter mentioned on Face the Nation Sunday that Khanna didn’t really coordinate with Israeli officials about his visit, for obvious reasons: he wanted to put on a show:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, before I let you go, there were two high-profile incidents I want to quickly touch on here. One, a CNN crew attacked in the West Bank by what they say were four settlers. There was also an incident with Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, who said he was his vehicles he was in were stopped by Israeli settlers, and then when the IDF showed up, they were on the side of the settlers, not him. He said "[i]t's not a good idea to detain longshot presidential candidates". It was a warning to your government. Do you think your government needs to apologize to both him and those CNN journalists?
MICHAEL LEITER: Any violence is to be condemned. No excuses, no explanations. Okay. So if CNN crew was attacked, that needs to be condemned, and I'm doing so right now. And we need to do a better job.
BRENNAN: You are condemning it [unint]--
LEITER: --If- if- if it was- actually took place as they've reported it, absolutely condemning it. We need to rein in violence on all sides. Now, in terms of Ro Khanna, we reached out to him when we heard he was going to Israel, the Israeli embassy here in Washington. As all congressmen do, they coordinate their trip with the Israeli government. We suggested he visit with- with survivors of the October 7th massacre. That he visit the borders, so he understands the, the issues that we have in our borders and so on. He ignored that and he decided to coordinate his trip not with Israel, but with Palestinian activists and with J Street, which is a anti-government, anti-Israeli government advocacy group here in Washington. So you know he coordinated--
BRENNAN: It's a Jewish lobby group…
LEITER: Well, it's--
BRENNAN: …that is supportive of a different path for Israel.
LEITER: Yeah, yeah. I- I play tennis once a year. That doesn't make me a tennis player. The fact that they call themselves a Jewish organization is- is irrelevant. They're- they're- an advocacy group against the government of Israel. That has to be clear.
BRENNAN: The current government, Netanyahu government.
LEITER: Yes. Yes--
BRENNAN: That's what you mean, the government you work for.
LEITER: And Congressman Khanna, there has been no secret about his antipathy towards the government of Israel as well. So perhaps if he would have coordinated the trip- and then you know to have this incident on Wednesday and wait to release it on Saturday, maybe this had more something to do with his support of- of Graham Platner beforehand and the difficulties he had with that, and trying to shift the focus to something else. Perhaps I'm asking a question.
BRENNAN: Well, we did hear from Congressman Khanna, who said that there was an alert to the embassy on his behalf, and that they asked for the news…
LEITER: --There was not, there was not--
BRENNAN: …to be held until he had left the country, as well.
LEITER: There was a question. There was not an alert. There was a question about visas. That's all. But when we requested that he coordinate the trip with us, he rejected that by basically staying silent. So that's unfortunate. This whole incident is unfortunate. And if- if somebody, it's kind of interesting that somebody wants to declare a presidential run by running off to Israel? Not strange?
BRENNAN: Well, we're going to have to leave it there, sir. There's so much more to talk about with you, but I'm out of time. Thank you for coming.

Absolutely cooked.