Truth Before Narrative

 We are a little more than two months from the midterms. When the policy argument is thin, some Democrats reach for the older one: America is still that country. The one that hangs people from trees.

Jon Ossoff talks as if the Klan is on the ballot in Georgia. Ayanna Pressley says the Confederacy is alive and well. Jasmine Crockett points to “mysterious deaths” in Mississippi — people “found, hung or otherwise” — and says we can no longer rely on the Justice Department to look. The implication is not subtle. Vote our way, or you are choosing the noose.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Ben Shapiro spent part of a recent show on the cases that keep getting cited as proof. His column on the same argument is here.

Ms. Rachel is Rachel Accurso, the toddler YouTube host behind Songs for Littles. About 20 million subscribers, a Netflix kids show, the pink headband and overalls. Parents of two-year-olds know her as the person who teaches Wheels on the Bus. She started the channel in 2019 after her own son had a speech delay. She has a master’s in music education from NYU. TikTok is one of her platforms. It is not the source of the following.

She has spent the last couple of years putting politics in the same feed as the nursery rhymes. Gaza. ICE detention. In March she told NBC News, “I am political.” This week she put the hanging claim in its cleanest form: please listen to the Black community. Black people don’t hang themselves from trees. There have been at least seven this year.

The history that sentence is pointing at is real. The medical examiner reports and the surveillance footage are also real. Those two things are not required to cancel each other. They just have to be looked at in the same paragraph.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Here are the specific ones Shapiro named.

Enes Kanter: Where was the threat?

Chicago Sky owner Michael Alter banned Enes Kanter Freedom from Wintrust Arena after this past Sunday’s Fever game. The phrase he used was “a potential threat.”

The footage of the moment he is talking about is short.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Late third quarter. Natasha Cloud scores, celebrates, then walks toward the baseline. Freedom is sitting there in a shirt that reads “WOMAN noun. adult human female.” He stands. Arms out. One step toward the floor. Security fills the gap. He is walked out holding the shirt up for the building to read.

That is the act. This is how he framed it in a tweet:

“I just got kicked out of a @WNBA game for supporting WOMEN! Let that sink in, AMERICA! 🇺🇸”

Alter’s account is that Freedom had been chirping, that people in the seats said he started it, and that the night changed when he got up. “The security’s job isn’t to wait to see how far they get.” Fan code says you do not enter the court. On Wednesday he told OutKick that some threats do not get a warning, and he used shooting a gun as the extreme example.

Lake America

President Trump signed an order yesterday renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America.

Watch the signing: [VIDEO]

This is the same play as January 20, 2025, when he renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

A lot of people lost their minds over that one. I shrugged. The water did not move. Mexico did not agree. What changed was the name on U.S. federal maps.

Same limits here. The order tells the Dept. of Interior and the Board on Geographic Names to update the U.S. geographic names database within 30 days. Federal maps and documents are supposed to say Lake America. Canada does not have to. New York does not have to.

Text of August 27 executive order renaming Lake Ontario.

The Real Reason Gas Stays Expensive

Tom Ellsworth of the PBD Podcast walks through the numbers in Numbers Scream Ep. 35: The Real Reason Your Gas Is So Expensive.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

The default story is the Iran conflict. Crude did jump when the war started—from the low $60s toward $90. Ellsworth’s point is that this is not why the pump stays near $4.

What the driver pays is set in the middle, between the well and the station. That number is the crack spread.

Yampolskiy on PBD Podcast: The Control Problem

Patrick Bet-David sat down recently with Roman Yampolskiy, the University of Louisville computer scientist who argues that general superintelligence is not a tool we will learn to steer. The claim is blunt: a 99.9999 percent chance it eventually ends humanity.

Here’s the full conversation: [VIDEO]

The number is what travels. The argument is narrower. Yampolskiy is not mainly talking about lost jobs or deepfakes. Those are still human problems. His point is that once you build an agent smarter than every person in every domain, control is not unsolved. It is unsolvable.

A nuke is a tool. Someone still has to use it. Superintelligence, as he describes it, sets its own subgoals. Rational agents converge on the same moves: protect themselves, get more compute, more energy, more matter. If people are in the way, the system does not slow down. You do not count the ants before you pour the foundation.

Guardrails are for tools. Labs already strip them for testing. Models already lie, cheat tests, and route around refusals. If you cannot explain the weights, predict the next move, or contain the system, you are not in charge of it. At that point the race, the surplus, and the job market are secondary. If superintelligence exists anywhere, he says, it takes the rest of the board.

From Closed Loop to Common Sense

I used to celebrate when a Black Democrat became a Republican. It felt like someone had broken a long-standing spell. Black voters have long delivered overwhelming, almost automatic support to the Democratic Party, often without serious internal debate. Crossing that line looked like genuine independence.

Earlier this year I declared myself an Independent. My own voting history is mixed. I’ve voted in Republican primaries in Illinois and I’ve pulled Democratic ballots more often than not. The consistent thread has been trying to choose the better person for the office, not simply the preferred party. That approach has never been perfect, but it was the standard I tried to follow.

Watching interviews with former Democrats, former progressives, or former Democrat Socialists has shifted what I value most. Some of that thinking comes from The Free Press interview with Sabrina Joy Stevens, and from other interviews shared on this blog. The important move is not necessarily joining the Republican Party. The important move is leaving a closed feedback loop that rarely produces real solutions. The people who walk away from that loop matter more than the party they eventually land in.

2020 gave the country a clear look at the “systemic racism” narrative in real time. Even during a pandemic, the story ran that “persons of color” were fed up and therefore entitled to destroy. Looting, vandalism, toppling statues of Confederate figures and Christopher Columbus, calls to defund the police — all of it was framed as necessary or at least understandable. From where I sat, none of it was a solution. It was performance dressed up as justice, and the country paid for it.

Those excesses, followed by the Biden-Harris years, helped produce the return of Donald Trump. Many of the same progressives who cheered the 2020 upheaval still treat Trump’s re-election as proof that America remains the problem. They have not updated the diagnosis.

What I celebrate now is simpler and more useful: people who return to common sense. The open question is whether their stories — how they noticed the contradictions, how they left the dominant narrative — will prompt others to examine it for themselves.

Created by A.I.

Breaking the Closed Loop

Sabrina Joy Stevens spent nearly twenty years inside progressive activism—teaching, organizing, communications strategy, education reform, women’s rights, racial justice. She was not a bystander. She was a professional in what she later named Group Think, Inc.

Here is the Free Press conversation where she walks through how it ended: [VIDEO]

The rupture came in 2020. It was not one sudden conversion. It was the steady accumulation of contradictions that the ideology could no longer explain away. Progressives treated racism as a “deadly pandemic” while treating actual pandemic rules as optional when their preferred protests required it. The rhetoric stayed maximalist and urgent. The actions often looked unserious, selective, or counterproductive. The gap between the story and the results became impossible to ignore.

Matt Walsh on Gary, Memphis, and Zimbabwe

Matt Walsh’s new episode (Ep. 1828) is titled These American Cities Are Rapidly Turning into Zimbabwe.

Synopsis

Gary, Indiana is roughly 80 percent Black, spent nearly two weeks without power after the violent August 11 windstorm. Memphis, Tennessee — also majority Black — lost power to more than 100,000 households. Officials and activists quickly reached for the same explanation: environmental racism, systemic neglect, white supremacy.

Tennessee Rep. Justin Pearson immediately framed the Memphis outage as “another majority Black, working class city left in the dark.” Bernice King called the Gary blackout “part of a pattern” in which Black communities are expected to endure conditions that would be treated as intolerable elsewhere. Walsh takes direct aim at both, treating their comments as the familiar reflex that turns every infrastructure failure into racial grievance while ignoring the fact that NIPSCO’s leadership includes Black executives (CEO Lloyd Yates among them), Gary’s mayor and city council are Black, and Memphis is similarly led. While crews worked in Gary, someone shot at a marked utility vehicle, briefly pausing restoration. He then draws the comparison that gives the episode its title: Zimbabwe and South Africa declined sharply after the end of white minority rule, with failing infrastructure, high unemployment, and poverty. The core argument is that racial grievance politics shields local leadership from accountability, producing the same patterns of dysfunction.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Jesse Watters Primetime: El-Sayed’s First Trip into the Lion’s Den

Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat who narrowly won Michigan’s Senate primary earlier this month, sat down Monday night for what appears to be his first appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime. The setting was deliberate. El-Sayed is now the nominee in a pure toss-up race against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, a Trump-aligned candidate for the open seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters. Polls remain tight—RealClearPolitics averages show El-Sayed up by less than a point, with individual surveys scattering in both directions—and the contest could help decide control of the Senate.

El-Sayed used the interview to test how his message travels outside the progressive primary electorate. He also made sure to land a few direct shots at Rogers for dodging debates and avoiding the same Fox stage.

Here’s the full segment: [VIDEO]

Watters opened by pressing El-Sayed on abolishing ICE, a wealth tax on fortunes above $100 million, Medicare for All, the ongoing conflict with Iran, biological males in women’s sports, medical decisions involving minors, and past comments about Sharia law. El-Sayed repeatedly tried to redirect toward gas prices, grocery costs, and health-care affordability, arguing those are the issues Michigan voters actually raise. He defended his progressive economic positions while framing many of the cultural questions as distractions.

Mr. Beat vs. Matt Walsh on the Civil War

Mr. Beat posted a reaction video last week titled Matt “The Confederacy Was Based” Walsh.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

It responds directly to Matt Walsh’s Real History episode, “What Schools Don’t Teach You About the Civil War.”

Far Left Wins Primary. Florida Stays Red.

 Last Friday I wrote about the Florida primaries and Angie Nixon’s upset: Florida Primaries: Red State, Pink Megaphone.

This short Valuetainment clip frames the same result as evidence that “the far left is winning”: [VIDEO]

Color-Blind Law, Later Rules: Matt Walsh’s Real History of the Civil Rights Movement

In May I posted the trailer and a brief note: as always, I would withhold judgment until I actually saw it. I later watched the episode on DailyWire.com. I’m glad the full thing is finally on YouTube.

Matt Walsh’s Real History episode is the kind of thing this blog has always been for: a video that refuses the schoolbook version of a sacred American story. The title is The Real History of the Civil Rights Movement, Part 1: “A New Constitution.” His pitch is straightforward. Since the 1990s, classrooms have turned Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks into saints. 

Almost everything in that telling, he says, is incomplete or wrong. Who funded the movement? How non-violent was it? How racist was 1950s America, really? Did the 1964 Civil Rights Act help Black Americans, or did it rewrite the Constitution in ways we still live with?

Those are fair questions. Some of the answers are fair. Others are stretched, selective, or wrong. History is not a morality play.

Watch it here: [VIDEO]

Since this is now on YouTube, I can feed it to my A.I. assistant, pull the main points, and note the holes in Walsh’s narrative.

The About-Face: Moran on ABC’s Bubble

Terry Moran spent nearly three decades at ABC News. Last week he sat down with the hosts of The Fifth Column and said something most people inside the networks still won’t: [VIDEO]

Asked straight out whether ABC News is a liberal institution, Moran answered “Yes.” He didn’t blame individual bias so much as the absence of any real disagreement inside the building. “It’s because of lack of viewpoint diversity,” he said. “That was one of the problems in covering Trump. Nobody had voted for him.”

He described sending internal emails urging colleagues to cover Trump more fairly and getting quiet thank-yous from engineers and the occasional producer—people outside the on-air and senior editorial ranks. The bubble, he insisted, is real. Journalists who never encounter the worldview of the people who actually voted for Trump struggle to understand why those voters see someone like Stephen Miller as a defender of borders rather than a “world-class hater.”

Florida Primaries: Red State, Pink Megaphone

I didn’t follow the recent Florida primaries closely. Among other races, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds won the Republican nomination for governor with about 48 percent in a crowded field. President Trump endorsed him early. Donalds is a Black Republican. If he wins in November, he would be the first Black Republican elected governor in American history. (During Reconstruction, P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana, a Republican, served briefly as acting governor after the sitting governor was impeached.) Florida is no longer a swing state. He is the heavy favorite against Democrat David Jolly, a former Republican congressman who switched parties.

He’s not the only Black Republican with a real shot this cycle. In Michigan, John James won the GOP nomination for governor. Michigan is more of a blue state than Florida, so his path is harder, but it’s a race worth watching.

What conservatives have been talking about this week is the Democratic Senate primary. This is a special election for the remainder of Marco Rubio’s term after he became Secretary of State. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed former Attorney General Ashley Moody to the seat in January 2025. State Rep. Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat who joined the Democratic Socialists of America during the campaign, beat the well-funded former Army officer and national-security official Alexander Vindman. Vindman outraised her by a huge margin—roughly $16 million to under $1 million—and still lost. That tells you where the energy is on the Democratic side right now.

I’ve seen enough of Nixon’s clips to be tired of the act. Since the primary she’s tried to sound a little more moderate in interviews. So far it looks thin. Florida being as red as it is, she still has an uphill climb against Moody. Beating a better-funded, more “electable” candidate anyway shows the direction of the party’s base.

Nixon is not new to theatrical protest. In April, during the House vote on DeSantis’s mid-decade congressional maps, she marched the floor in a hot-pink jumpsuit with a matching pink bullhorn, shouting that the maps were “illegal” and a “violation of the Constitution.” The vote still passed 83-28. The House later reprimanded her. She and colleagues did a similar floor sit-in in 2022. Here’s one of the April clips: Fox News.

On Vindman: He was the National Security Council’s Ukraine director. He listened to the July 25, 2019, Trump-Zelensky call and later testified that Trump had improperly asked Ukraine to investigate the Bidens (and Burisma) in connection with a White House meeting and military aid. Vindman reported the call internally as improper; he brought his twin brother, Yevgeny (Eugene) Vindman, an NSC lawyer, along when he went to the NSC’s top counsel. Alexander became a central witness in the first impeachment. After the Senate acquitted Trump, both brothers were removed from the White House in February 2020. Eugene later won a House seat in Virginia in 2024.

Here's a report from FOX 35 Orlando [VIDEO]

'We’ll Do It Live' With Andrew Cuomo

I didn’t share it at the time, but I found former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s May appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s We’ll Do It Live podcast revealing. It’s timely now given the increased scrutiny of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s role during the pandemic. Cuomo was a central figure then, before he resigned in his third term.

You can watch here: [VIDEO]

O’Reilly Takes On Ossoff’s Iran Speech

 Bill O’Reilly’s latest No Spin clip is short, pointed, and worth watching. [VIDEO]

The Arday Affair

Matt Walsh’s new episode is less a recap of the Jason Arday scandal than a look at what the scandal produced. After the Cambridge professor’s death, a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square to treat a man whose record was already collapsing under plagiarism claims and an implausible life story as a hunted racial martyr. Walsh plays the footage, the speeches, and the demands for media control. The point is not simply that Arday’s career does not survive scrutiny. It is that a certain politics would rather canonize the wreckage than admit the hiring, the standards, and the story were the problem.

You can watch Walsh's podcast here: [VIDEO]

The Politics of Gaslighting

Konstantin Kisin, the Russian-born comedian, Triggernometry co-host, and author of An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, sat down with John Anderson and said something most British politicians still won’t: the country is poorer than its people think, and the people in charge keep telling them otherwise.

Watch the conversation: [VIDEO]

The interview is called “The Politics Of Gaslighting.” Kisin walks through the numbers without the usual hedging. Most Britons, according to polling he cites, still believe their country is in the same wealth league as Switzerland, Singapore or Australia. On a per-capita basis it isn’t. Britain sits much further down the table and is close to being overtaken by Poland. The pie is shrinking. The argument is over who gets the next slice.

That’s the part that travels. GDP can be juiced by importing more people. Per-person living standards are a different story. Kisin’s point is that the political class has every incentive to keep measuring the first number and ignore the second. Anderson, who has seen the same productivity stall in Australia, keeps asking the obvious follow-up: how do you tell people the truth when they have been trained to treat it as an attack?