"On Saturday night, May 23rd, a shooter once again sought to murder the President, his family, and his staff at the historic White House complex."

"On Saturday night, May 23rd, a shooter once again sought to murder the President, his family, and his staff at the historic White House complex."

"We submit this urgent filing to update the Court on a second attempted assassination on the President within a single month. Last night, shortly after 6:00 p.m., an armed assassin approached a White House security checkpoint near 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, professionally pulled a high caliber gun from a bag, and opened fire in the exact direction of the White House. Brave Secret Service officers returned fire. The gunman was killed...."

From the Notice of Supplemental Authority in Support of the Government’s Motion for an Indicative Ruling Dissolving the Court’s Injunction, filed yesterday in National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, the case about the White House ballroom, posted by Trump at Truth Social this morning.

"The under construction East Wing Project, which is on time and under budget, includes state of the art security features to repel all attacks against the President, his family, his staff, and esteemed visitors. These include a heavy steel, drone proof roof, missile resistant and drone proof columns, bullet, ballistic, and blast proof glass, Military grade venting for air conditioning and heating, and much more. Together, the entire Facility, which includes bomb shelters, a state of the art hospital and medical facilities, Top Secret military installations, structures, and equipment, protective partitioning, and other features, is a single integrated, complex unit that is vital for the National Security of the United States. This meritless Lawsuit has been a great attack on our Country in that the Military, Secret Service, and Law Enforcement are not happy that all of these Top Secret features have been revealed to potential enemies, criminals, and all others, including the fact that there will be a major drone port and Government sniper facilities on the heavily secured roof of the Ballroom, all for the sake of an unhappy passerby, a woman with absolutely no standing, represented by the 'National Trust,' which was defunded by Congress due to a total lack of respect for them.

"The Ballroom’s rooftop will serve a crucial strategic function for the security of the entire White House complex and beyond, including a drone port and key location for rooftop snipers who will protect the White House and the entire Washington, D.C. area, as a whole. Unlike virtually every similar structure in America, the Ballroom’s rooftop will include no air conditioning, venting, or similar facilities—It will be hermetically sealed to prevent malign forces from contaminating the circulating air, thereby threatening the lives of those inside. All of these and other specifications would have been kept secret, as is appropriate, but have been forced to be revealed to stave off the Court’s dangerous injunction...."

I'm Sorry, but California Is HOW Deep in the Hole?

I'm Sorry, but California Is HOW Deep in the Hole?

Stephen Green  

AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes

What do you call a state absolutely flush with cash, with tax revenues booming more than 30% in just three years? If it's California, you call it "Broke."

Wait, wut?

“I once heard that the job of a budget analyst is to find the gray cloud in every silver lining, so unfortunately, along with the silver linings of revenues, we see quite a bit of gray clouds on the horizon,” Rachel Ehlers, deputy legislative analyst for the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), told California lawmakers on Tuesday.

The silver lining is the revenue boom. The gray clouds are the state's structural deficit, "both for the coming budget year, '26-27, as well as forecast for '27-28, even under the governor’s proposals," Ehlers added.

“Really, the only way the budget proposal before you is balanced is by relying on reserves,” Ehlers added during an Assembly Budget Subcommittee hearing. “Under the governor’s proposal, both withdrawals from reserves, as well as suspended requirements to put money into reserves, totals $20 billion.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom's "plan" to close the deficit — and allow me to reiterate, during a stunning increase in tax revenue — is to raid the state's rainy day fund. The LAO says the raid includes $1.5 billion worth of suspended deposits, a $5 billion withdrawal, a $7 billion suspended deposit, followed by another $7 billion withdrawal.

Even so, that still leaves a $16.9 billion hole in the budget.

If you're thinking that boom times are when you're supposed to plug money into the rainy day fund instead of taking it out, you'd never make it in California politics. That's a compliment, by the way.

Imagine you got a $30,000 pay raise but spent so much money that you had to dip deep into your savings, postpone deposits into your IRA, and still had to put $15,000 worth of typical expenses like groceries on the MasterCard.

Crazy, right? But in California, it's the law. 

Follow me closely here, or you might not believe just how baked-in the madness is.

See, it doesn't matter how much new revenue the AI boom brings in; Prop 98 — backed by the all-powerful California Teachers Association and passed by gullible voters — forces more money into schools and community colleges when General Fund revenues rise, but doesn't really allow for lower spending when revenues fall. 

What if the AI boom proves to be a bubble that goes POP? What if the wealth tax passes in November and more billionaires flee the state? What if the stock market corrects and capital gains taxes crater? In other words, what if the revenue boom turns into a bust? Don't you worry, gentle reader, because those Prop 98 "education" spending increases are more or less set in stone.

Yet while California ranks around 12th place or so for spending-per-pupil, student proficiency is mired in the bottom half of states, and declining. 

Medi-Cal — California's version of Medicaid — also features structural impediments to achieving fiscal sanity. Medi-Cal is what happens when Sacramento builds a permanently expanding entitlement on top of a tax base that fluctuates wildly, depending on Wall Street and Silicon Valley. If California's education spending is the very definition of Margaret Thatcher's ratchet effect, Medi-Cal is the never-ending entitlement that blossoms in bad times, and grows only somewhat slower during the booms. 

California taxpayers put themselves on a treadmill where no matter how hard they run, it turns even faster.

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2026/05/20/im-sorry-but-california-is-how-deep-in-the-hole-n4953057?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Woke May Have Passed Its Peak, But What's Coming Next From the Left Is Scary Bad

Woke May Have Passed Its Peak, But What's Coming Next From the Left Is Scary Bad

Rick Moran 

Wokeness has peaked, thanks to some determined and intelligent pushback from the right. Campaigns to expose the hypocrisy of woke culture in business, its sheer idiocy, the basic unfairness of DEI, and the re-election of Donald Trump, among other things, have driven wokeness into a much smaller public space. 

Today, you find wokeness prevalent on college campuses, certain coastal enclaves, and self-consciously liberal cities like Minneapolis and New York City. Besides that, the great majority of middle America rejected the worst of woke and embraced traditional values. 

Wokeness has been defanged. Cancel culture no longer holds sway over vast swaths of culture and society, as it once did. Part of the reason is that black and Latino males saw woke as a threat to their masculine identity (it is), and for minorities to lose that identity would have emasculated them. They voted in unprecedented numbers for an alpha male whom they may not agree with on everything, but whom they saw as willing to fight against the emasculators.

Now, the idea that "speech is violence" is being replaced with something far more sinister and worrisome. "The forces behind wokeism no longer command so much public attention and respect when they argue about terms and pronouns," writes Tyler Cowen of The Free Press. "Instead, left-adjacent movements have arisen with a contrasting emphasis on action, and often action of a terrible sort."

The left has taken the attitude, "If we can't beat 'em, kill 'em."

The Free Press:

What’s more, it is possible we are entering an era with a new culture of assassinations. There have been assassinations of Charlie Kirk, of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and several attempts on the life of President Trump. It can be debated how many of these killers had direct connections to the political left, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that left-wing rhetoric about democracy destruction helped make such actions conceivable.

The social energies of the American left have moved away from the realm of speech and into plans for concrete action, whether in politics, through attempted wealth confiscations, or through organizing violence. In retrospect, wokeism, for all its problems, was a relatively harmless way of distracting activists and keeping them busy with wars over words—a less-bad allocation of social energies than what we are now seeing. So while I would not say I long for the return of high wokeism, I recognize it has been replaced by a left-adjacent movement that is worse.

"It is important to distinguish between the positive side of wokeism and the unreasonable side," Cowen writes. "The positive side supported gay rights and discouraged racism in the public sphere."

Indeed, "real" wokeism is nothing more than American tolerance for different races, opposing views, and different lifestyles. But the wokies weaponized woke, made cancel culture a power-mad attempt to dictate all aspects of culture, sex, and a mania for "diversity, equity, and inclusion." As it turns out, woke was a vote loser, not a vote winner. The right didn't kill woke as much as woke's terrible excesses and intolerance helped it to commit suicide.

Cowen writes, "The unreasonable side [of woke] brought us cancel culture, stifled discussion, insisted on very particular views of race and gender identity, boosted DEI and other race-discriminatory policies, and generally made America a more intolerant place." 

As woke wanes as a political weapon, it's being replaced with real weapons and a visceral hate for the left's political opponents. Their frustration at losing at the ballot box has generated wild ideas such as expanding the Supreme Court, confiscating wealth (California's billionaire tax), expanding Congress, and eliminating the Electoral College. If they can't win legally, they will win by subterfuge or "lawfare." 

There's only one outcome possible if the left continues to escalate the violence, ratchet up its hysterical rhetoric, and attempt to pull legal shenanigans to disenfranchise voters who don't agree with them.

That outcome will not benefit anyone and could spell the end of our republic.

https://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2026/05/19/woke-may-have-passed-its-peak-but-whats-coming-next-from-the-left-is-scary-bad-n4953011

The Choice Facing California Conservatives: Despair or Fight

The Choice Facing California Conservatives: Despair or Fight

Aaron Hanscom 

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File

It’s a question many conservatives in California have likely asked themselves more than once: How is it possible not to despair at the decline of the Golden State?

PragerU CEO Marissa Streit this week posed that question to Dennis Prager, perhaps the ideal person to answer it. Prager, who grew up in New York, moved to Los Angeles in 1976 and couldn't have been more excited. It’s difficult to imagine now, but as he recalls, California was then “identified in America’s mind with freedom.”

Interestingly, Prager is now in Florida — or, as Gov. Ron DeSantis dubs it, the “Free State of Florida” — a place many conservatives, including Dave Rubin and Ben Shapiro, have fled to in search of relief from California’s high taxes, heavy regulations, out-of-control homelessness, and rising crime. Prager is there for another reason: recovering from a devastating fall in 2024 that left him paralyzed. 

     Related: Dennis Prager Gives First On-Camera Interview Since Devastating Injury

Prager didn’t despair in the aftermath of that life-changing accident, and he tells conservatives in California — and America more broadly — they shouldn’t either:

Despair is a sin. It's a copout for not fighting. For me personally, in my condition, I had three choices. Literally three: death, despair, or persevere to the best of my ability and live life. Since I don't want to have depression and despair, and I certainly don't want to die, I have no choice. We have no choice but to fight. It's unbelievable to me. The guys who stormed Normandy Beach, they had a lot more reason for despair than we do fighting the left and the Islamists in the United States because we go back to our families at night. A lot of them knew they wouldn't go back anywhere. It's a sin.

But it sometimes feels like, in one-party-ruled California, leftists don’t even need to show up to the fight. Take Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who — along with further-left progressive City Councilmember Nithya Raman — dropped out of a mayoral forum days after being embarrassed at an L.A. mayoral debate by GOP candidate Spencer Pratt. Even though 89% of viewers, according to an NBC Los Angeles poll, thought the former reality TV star won the debate, and while his powerful viral campaign ads are giving him momentum, conservatives have learned not to get their hopes up, although Prager doesn’t rule out a Pratt victory:

Spencer Pratt may win. I mean, it's possible. I don't predict it, but it's possible. People are sick and tired of homeless encampments. They're sick and tired of taxes. They're sick and tired of the fires and no homes being rebuilt.

I agree that Angelenos are fed up, as I pointed out in "Are L.A. Voters Finally Waking Up — Or Headed for the Same Mistake Again?" However, there were enough voters sick and tired of Gov. Gavin Newsom to force a recall election in 2021, and we all remember how that turned out. The left was able to portray the Republican frontrunner in that race — Prager’s longtime friend, Larry Elder — as the "black face of white supremacy" and link him to Trump. Newsom went on to easily survive the recall.

Pratt’s opponents are now trying to do the same thing by labeling him a MAGA candidate. In an NBCLA interview, Pratt was asked how he expects to win in a city that rarely votes Republican:

It’s a nonpartisan race. And the mayor is a nonpartisan race because the mayor is supposed to represent all of Angelenos. And that’s what I do. All the people I meet with every day are Democrats. It’s all the business owners and community leaders, all Democrats, [who have] already voted for me, turned in their ballots early. 

Recent reports back up Pratt's claims. According to PageSix Hollywood, Nicole Avant — who was Barack Obama's ambassador to the Bahamas — has "stunned" L.A. with her decision to support Pratt. Other prominent Democrats, like billionaire entertainment mogul Haim Saban and Universal Music Group Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge, have also donated to Pratt. 

       Related: California's Last Hope

So there are signs, including rising poll numbers, that a surprise may be in the making. But even if Pratt wins and Steve Hilton wins the governor's race, is it too late? If it is, that bodes poorly for all of the West. As Prager says, “California is a microcosm of Western civilization.”

And Western civilization, if you haven't noticed, is on life support at the moment — not just in Europe, but also in the United States. Prager warns:

It's almost inexplicable that people don't care about this enough until it's right at their doorstep. So what's happening in the UK? There's an awakening. I don't know if it's too late. The number of Islamists, not peaceful Muslims, but Sharia-desiring Muslims known as Islamists, in Britain, in the UK, is quite large. As, by the way, it's true in America, in, uh, Michigan, for example, where we have districts that elect radical Islamists because that's the voting body there.

Just as conservatives in Texas, Florida, and across the nation should care about radical Islamists being elected in Michigan, they should also support conservatives in California — a state that just saw a mayor resign over connections to the Chinese Communist Party — as they continue fighting politicians and policies that are undermining the country.

https://pjmedia.com/aaron-hanscom/2026/05/19/the-choice-facing-california-conservatives-despair-or-fight-n4953028?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm

Hakeem the Extreme: Bitter Jeffries Unloads Rage at Voters, Athletes, and Reality

 Hakeem the Extreme: Bitter Jeffries Unloads Rage at Voters, Athletes, and Reality

By Bob Hoge  

    

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY-08) has always had a slightly desperate air about him since he took over the reins from Rep. Nancy Pelosi in November 2022. He lives in her shadow, and in fact, many observers consider him her puppet.

He has grown increasingly bitter over the years as his political impotence is exposed almost daily by the Republicans, who keep trumping him on issue after issue. He's gone from just being generally unlikable to bitter, vitriolic, and resentful, and his endless rage stands in stark contrast to the optimism and hope that Trump and the GOP radiate.

He was at it again on Tuesday, using inciting rhetoric at a progressive event to further inflame his base. Even in an era where we’ve seen increased political violence, this is the kind of language he inexplicably finds appropriate:

Jeffries, who stands to gain the House speaker’s gavel if Democrats take the majority in the midterm election, said that "part of how we as House Democrats view this moment, either MAGA extremists are going to break the country, or we're going to break them, and our goal is to break them."

During the panel, Jeffries assured, "As a guarantee, we are taking back control of the United States House of Representatives in November."

"We will defeat them," he continued. "We have to beat them electorally, and then we have to break their spirit, because of the extremism that's being unleashed on the American people, that's completely and totally unacceptable."

What even is this?! He wants to “break” over half the voters in this country (77 million) who chose Trump in ’24? That’s some pretty sick stuff.

Minnesota GOP Rep. Walter Hudson summed things up nicely:

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UNHINGED: Hot Takes: Hakeem Jeffries Implodes As Republicans Celebrate VA Supreme Court's Gerrymander Ruling

Watch: Hakeem Jeffries Launches Wild Attack on SCOTUS in Wake of Voting Rights Decision

---

Conservative Actor/Director/Producer/Author Nick Searcy, director of “Gosnell,” had some choice words for the divisive NY rep: “The good guys don't say things like this. The super villains do.”

Hakeem the Extreme wasn’t done, though. On Tuesday, he stood on the Capitol steps, joining forces with the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), to stoke racial division by calling on black athletes to boycott the powerhouse athletic conference, the Southeastern Conference (SEC), to protest redistricting areas in southern states.

You mean the kind of redistricting effort that you heartily endorsed just days ago in Virginia, and an illegal gambit that even the VA Supreme Court couldn’t stomach? Or the kind of trashing of the state constitution promulgated by California Gov. Gavin Newsom with his Prop. 50 scheme?

Let’s see if we can undermine race relations and send them back to another era:

Leader @hakeemjeffries: This is an unprecedented moment with an attack on Black political representation, and it requires an unprecedented response. We are here in solidarity with the NAACP and its call for athletes to boycott SEC institutions in these states that have unleashed these Jim Crow racially oppressive tactics.

Bitterness, angst, fear, and hate: those appear to be the Democrats’ main political postures since Biden was finally exposed as a puppet president and sent packing. Hakeem is even outdoing his sclerotic counterpart in the Senate, Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and it’s dangerous.

No matter how much rage and hate rhetoric Jeffries spouts, it will never make him captivating or appealing to anyone but his most hardcore acolytes. In the meantime, however, he’s doing a lot of damage. 

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/05/19/hakeem-the-extreme-bitter-jeffries-unloads-rage-at-voters-athletes-and-reality-n2202513?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

GOP Needs More Than Investigations and Outrage to Combat Voter Fraud

GOP Needs More Than Investigations and Outrage to Combat Voter Fraud

Stephen Kruiser  

AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Beierweldt suddenly developed a taste for kipper snacks and a vanilla milkshake after a mentally taxing croquet match. 

Here we go again. With the midterm elections now less than half a year away, it would be nice if all we had on our minds were the classic election concerns of yesteryear, like messaging and the quality of our candidates. If the fortunes of the Republican Party were riding on regular stuff like that, I'd be throwing money at Polymarket and betting on a GOP romp in November. 

We're dealing with 21st century Democrats here, though. They don't do much in the way of developing policies that appeal to American voters in order to win elections. The strengths of the modern Democratic Party are insincere pandering and, um, tinkering with elections.

The Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media repeatedly assure us that election fraud exists only in the minds of Republicans. Apparently, we have very vivid imaginations. This is from Victoria:

Do you remember that crime that never happens? Voter fraud? Yeah, it happened again, and this time, James O'Keefe got it on video. Now, federal prosecutors in California have announced they've made their first arrest in a scheme that paid bums on Skid Row to register to vote. That's a federal crime, by the way. 

Federal prosecutors in the Los Angeles Central District of California U.S. Attorneys Office on Monday announced a plea agreement — that's called a conviction — of a woman, Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, who was caught on tape more than 28 times paying people with cash or cigarettes to register to vote. She registered them to vote so they could sign petitions for which she was paid.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the Skid Row denizens aren't hardcore MAGA types when sobering up long enough to cast a vote. 

The Democratic elites use all of their imagination concocting schemes like this. I don't like giving them any compliments, but they are very good at this sort of thing. I am convinced that there are people at the Democratic National Committee who never sleep and devote all of their time to coming up with new "anomalies" that they can introduce into the election process. 

The 2020 election still haunts us, especially after the four years of gloom and doom that followed it. Yesterday, Matt wrote that the Department of Justice is investigating some of those aforementioned anomalies from 2020. The focus is on Arizona and Fulton County in Georgia. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said it's taken so long to dive deeply into it because, "it takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020."

It's important to try and figure out what happened in Maricopa and Fulton counties in 2020, but I wonder how much they can figure out six years later. My concern is the next election. True, we have to know what happened in the past to thwart efforts to do the same in the future. As I said earlier, though, the Democrats will always find new ways to destroy election integrity. 

Until the GOP does something concrete to shore up future elections — SAVE Act, anyone? — the Ghost of Election Fraud Past will create voter apathy on the right. I can't begin to count how many conservatives I've met who believe that, because of the Democrats' obsession with election chicanery, it doesn't matter whether they vote or not. That kind of resignation is precisely what the Dems are trying to induce. 

I am far too nervous about what could happen in November to waste any emotional bandwidth on 2020. If I were back in the activist mood, I would be organizing a rotating protest to camp outside the office door of Sen. John "Jellyfish" Thune until he either shepherded the SAVE Act into law or resigned in shame. Any anger that Republcans are still feeling about 2020 should be directed at Thune and channeled through repeated phone calls and emails to his office. 

Yes, I write about this a lot. I do it because I truly believe that we're only an election or two away from the Democrats achieving their dream of one-party rule if the Republicans don't find a way to inject some sanity into the way we elect the people who run our country. 

To be continued...

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2026/05/19/the-morning-briefing-gop-needs-more-than-investigations-and-outrage-to-combat-voter-fraud-n4953003/?utm_campaign=nl_pm&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pjmediambvip

Hapless Dems Can Only Watch and Do Nothing As Senate Republicans Ram Through Dozens of Trump Nominees

Hapless Dems Can Only Watch and Do Nothing As Senate Republicans Ram Through Dozens of Trump Nominees

By Bob Hoge  

    

AP Photo/Ben Curtis

GOP senators pushed through almost 50 Trump civilian nominees Monday night by a 46-43 vote, meaning that they have now installed 60 percent of the president’s choices. 

Democrats, led by the TDS-riddled Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), had been hell-bent on blocking the confirmations, so the Republicans pulled out the so-called “nuclear option” in September 2025. This allowed executive‑branch confirmations to pass by a simple majority instead of a 60-vote threshold.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who was a strong proponent of the rule change, said the confirmations will make our streets safer:

This is the fourth time since the rule change that the Senate has rammed through nominees en masse:

Included in the latest batch are 20 different positions, including a dozen U.S. attorneys, several U.S. marshals, ambassadors and members of a variety of agencies, including the departments of War, Transportation, Energy, and others.

Also included in the group is Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Land Management and a former member of Congress, Stevan Pearce.

Leftist Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) was triggered by the move, which can only mean one thing: it’s a positive development.

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MORE: Breaking. Thune Uses Nuclear Option to Confirm 48 Trump Nominees in a Single Vote

Senate Republicans Again Outmaneuver Dems in Their Attempt to Hold up Hundreds of Pres. Trump's Nominees

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Adding to the Dems’ woes, the guy the Senate confirmed as Trump’s choice to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is not an environmental nutcase:

The U.S. Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s pick to oversee the management of a quarter-billion acres of public lands on Monday, as the administration pushes ahead with more mining and drilling while reversing conservation plans.

Former congressman Steve Pearce will lead the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management following Monday's 46-43 confirmation vote. Pearce’s background as a Republican Party leader in New Mexico known for supporting public land leasing and industry made him a contentious pick. Democrats and environmental groups were strongly opposed.

"Democrats and environmental groups were strongly opposed." Again, that can only mean it's a good thing. Wyoming Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis is a fan:

The main agenda of the Senate Democrats in Trump’s second term seems to be “obstruct.” Then obstruct some more. When that fails, screech that the world is ending.

In this particular battle, however, it would seem that they’re getting their rear ends handed to them.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2026/05/18/hapless-dems-can-only-watch-and-do-nothing-as-senate-republicans-ram-through-dozens-of-trump-nominees-n2202465?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Ex-Climate Alarmist Lucy Biggers Now Admits: 'It Was All a Scam'

Ex-Climate Alarmist Lucy Biggers Now Admits: 'It Was All a Scam'

By Ward Clark  

    

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

The climate change issue has drawn in a lot of people who just don't seem to think too deeply about the issue. Climate scolds, like leftists in general, seem to be predominantly driven by emotion, rather than facts; they are swayed by emotional arguments, not rational discourse. That's true not just on climate change and environmental issues, mind you; this general rule applies to a range of things from gun control to economic issues.

What's remarkable is that once in a while, a person who actually does expect a fact-based argument, who actually thinks about issues and looks for evidence, can reverse their previous position on an issue. 

This brings us to a former - yes, former climate scold named Lucy Biggers. In a recent interview with the YouTube channel Triggernometry, Ms. Biggers explained the transformation in her thinking. 

First, she read, and chose two authors in particular, authors that she knew wouldn't agree with her existing opinions.

Schellenberger and Koonin

One of the major turning points came around 2020, when she began secretly reading books that directly challenged the apocalyptic climate narrative. Specifically, she cites Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never and Steve Koonin’s Unsettled, the latter of which opened her eyes to the idea that extreme weather patterns are not matching the catastrophic claims pushed by the media.

Key concept: Intelligent people, to my thinking, challenge their own options, their own biases, their pre-conceived notions. That's why I read The Nation, Mother Jones, and, on occasion, watch MSNOW. Not only is it important to know what the opposition is thinking, the better to counter it, but one never knows when someone on the other side makes a good point. (Granted, with the outlets I mentioned, that almost never happens.)

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Read More: Why More Cows Mean Less Carbon: The Rinderpest Lesson

Cracks in the Climate Consensus: 46 IPCC Insiders Challenge CO2 Panic

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Next, the COVID debacle gave Lucy Biggers a stark look at what overbearing government control looks like.

Glimpse at dystopia

Secondly, the 2020 lockdowns provided a massive wake-up call regarding what “Net Zero” measures actually look like in practice. She realized that despite the global economy completely shutting down and individuals losing their freedoms, global carbon emissions only dropped by about 5%. This made her question the authoritarian nature and feasibility of the movement’s goals.

The COVID lockdowns were an eye-opener for a lot of us. All of us lucky enough to be Americans are used to being able to come and go as we please, dress as we please, and in the event of a flu outbreak, which this was, to decide for ourselves what measures to take. When COVID-19 hit, many of those options were taken from us. We were compelled to wear masks, grocery store aisles became one-way streets, and restaurants and gyms closed. The one bright spot was that leftists, who never saw an overbearing government action they wouldn't take to the next level, became even easier to spot: They were the ones driving alone in their personal car or walking down a sidewalk alone on a warm, sunny day - wearing a mask. And, as Ms. Biggers came to realize, this was precisely the kind of control the climate scolds were advocating in favor of - all the time, viruses or no viruses.

Finally, Ms. Biggers realized that the climate scolds were, in effect, an apocalyptic cult.

Realization it’s a destructive mindset

Thirdly, having her first son in 2022 forced her to establish healthier emotional boundaries and take stock of her values. She realized she did not want to pass down a destructive mindset of existential dread and perpetual guilt for consuming resources in a modern world to her children.

Dread and guilt; I've been writing and speaking about climate change and environmental issues for many years, and that's as apt a description of the mindset of these people that I've seen. But there's one more aspect: Control. If you're familiar with the tortured arguments the climate scolds make, it is at first hard to understand what they hope to gain - until you realize that it's all about control. It's always about control. It always has been about control.

In this great interview, Lucy Biggers comments on several other factors, such as the climate scoldery being a psychological and ideological rationale; if you have followed this issue through the years, you will have noticed that (like so many left-wing causes) climate scolds are overwhelmingly white, urban liberals. These are the same people who rattle on endlessly about "oppressed peoples" and the evils of capitalism. Thus, climate scoldery gives them a perfect platform for a progressive trifecta: More control, more repression of capitalism (that is, freedom of commerce), and more virtue signaling.

Virtue signaling, indeed, is at the very heart of the matter. There is a high degree, as Ms. Biggers points out, of attention-seeking and self-importance in the most vocal climate scolds:

…you get the nihilism, you get addicted to the nihilism, you get addicted to your your own sense of self-importance, you get addicted to the fact that you are right and other people are wrong and then the engagement you receive on social media—it’s a constant feedback loop.

What's missing in all this? Evidence. Facts. Analysis. But the political left has never cared too much about those things. Lucy Biggers does, though. That is why, now, she is a former climate scold. It's amazing to see the result of someone learning to look at an issue rationally.

You can see the entire 70-minute interview here. 

https://redstate.com/wardclark/2026/05/17/ex-climate-alarmist-lucy-biggers-now-admits-it-was-all-a-scam-n2202417?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl