U.S. Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) told an audience at the University of Chicago that she wants future investigations of Trump administration officials to send a deterrent message. Young people considering jobs in a Republican administration, she said, should wonder whether joining it might buy them “a ton of problems.”
Slotkin describes her proposal as accountability for corruption. But listen to the threat embedded in her political strategy: Make public service under the wrong president so frightening that talented young conservatives never enter government. She said the quiet part out loud, and conservatives would be fools to ignore it.
If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes.
The peaceful transfer of power depends on losers believing they can survive defeat and return to fight another election. That assumption is eroding.
From the Bush-Gore recount to birtherism, Russiagate, and the battles over COVID-era voting rules, every disputed election has taught Americans to question the legitimacy of the next result. A political system cannot endure indefinitely when losing means permanent exclusion, financial ruin, or the threat of prosecution.
Eventually, the incentive to win at any cost overwhelms the willingness to accept defeat. The ballot is supposed to decide who holds office, not which faction gets to use the state to erase its rivals.
Donald Trump accelerated that deterioration because he inspires a peculiar derangement in his enemies. Progressives convinced themselves that Trump was a fascist dictator preparing a thousand-year Reich. They portrayed ordinary political disagreements as existential emergencies and justified extraordinary tactics as necessary resistance.
The campaign to stop Trump continued after he left office. His opponents pursued lawsuits, criminal cases, and ballot challenges designed to prevent his return. Conservatives watched the machinery of politics become an instrument for destroying the opposition. The law may permit a particular lawsuit or prosecution. That does not mean Americans should be comfortable watching every political contest turn into a criminal investigation.
Trump also survived two assassination attempts in 2024. The atmosphere of political hatred should disturb anyone who expects elections to settle disputes without bloodshed. Instead, much of the left treats Trump's second administration as an even more terrifying prospect because he has learned something from the first: Personnel determine whether a president can govern. The specter of Cheeto Hitler now excuses an endless war against anyone who might help him.
Trump entered Washington in 2017 without understanding how thoroughly permanent bureaucracies could frustrate his agenda. Officials who considered themselves guardians of the government against its elected leader resisted him from within. This time he has pursued loyal appointments and executive action aggressively.
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Progressives understand that a Republican administration staffed by people committed to its program is harder to neutralize than one staffed by its enemies. So the fight has shifted from Trump himself to the Americans willing to serve him.
That is what makes Slotkin's remarks so revealing. Young graduates already face a difficult choice between a prosperous private career and the headaches of federal service. Now imagine telling them that four years at the Department of Justice or Homeland Security could lead to crippling legal bills once Democrats regain power. You need not imprison every conservative official. Ruin a few careers, and the next generation will learn to stay away. An opposition that cannot recruit competent personnel cannot govern, however many elections it wins.
Trump's greatest failure may be his refusal to impose meaningful costs on those who abused power against his movement. Anthony Fauci is not in prison. Officials who conservatives believe weaponized investigations have escaped accountability. Radical activists continue to operate, while prosecutions of political violence remain uneven at best. In repeated games, cooperation survives only when defection carries a price. Tit for tat is not a pleasant rule, but one side cannot endlessly punish the other while expecting restraint in return. Without consequences, bad conduct becomes a winning strategy.
The danger reaches beyond staffing.
Researcher Jennica Pounds, known online as DataRepublican, has published recordings and documents she says reveal preparations for a constitutional crisis involving a network called the United Democracy Alliance. According to her account, former military, intelligence, and diplomatic figures have discussed scenarios in which contested elections, executive branch action against protests, and defiance by Democrat governors could trigger a challenge to federal authority.
DataRepublican interprets those preparations as the groundwork for a seizure of power. Her account describes proposed political red lines, including a federal response to mass protests, that could become triggers for a confrontation between governors and Washington.
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One can chalk up the recordings as contingency planning, but the distinction grows thin when political operatives begin gaming out how governors might seize power amid a constitutional crisis. Elections are supposed to settle who governs. Planning to declare Washington illegitimate when an election or federal response goes the wrong way raises the stakes beyond ordinary opposition politics. Conservatives cannot afford to treat that possibility as an abstraction. They should examine the recordings, demand public answers, and prepare to defend their institutions.
No sane person should welcome domestic unrest. A country in which each election threatens imprisonment, confiscation, and violence would become unrecognizable. Americans have spent generations assuming that partisan combat ends when the ballots are counted. That bargain cannot survive if each party views the other as an enemy to be destroyed. Conservatives should demand lawful accountability for genuine wrongdoing, defend constitutional procedures, and refuse the comforting fantasy that decorum alone will restore the old rules.
None of this is permission to withdraw from politics. It is a reason to become harder to exclude. Vote. Recruit candidates. Build institutions. Win local offices. Know your sheriff, your neighbors, and the people responsible for keeping order. Cultivate lawyers, administrators, and young professionals willing to serve despite intimidation.
If the system is fraying, the worst response is to abandon every position of legitimate authority while the other side organizes. Democracy may not survive in the form Americans remember. The power conservatives build now will determine whether they have any say in what follows.
“Teen takeovers” have gone from a social-media spectacle to a serious public-safety issue. While the name conjures images of high schoolers innocently hanging around a drive-in à la "American Graffiti," at its core, this phenomenon is about sowing violence and chaos — and leaving communities to deal with the consequences.
The 2026 Wisconsin State Fair concluded its final evening with a massive brawl, during which violent “teens” swarmed the park and beat unassuming fair guests. One man was kicked and beaten as he lay in the fetal position. Earlier this summer, a teen takeover at a Chipotle in Washington, D.C., forced frightened patrons to scramble as youths began throwing chairs and screaming.
This is a natural consequence of an America that has glamorized injustice.
In cities across the nation, the same pattern of brutality has emerged: Swarms of young, primarily black teenagers will suddenly invade a public space to fight, threaten police, destroy private property, and occasionally get involved in shootings.
This is happening because over the past decade, our public institutions have encouraged black Americans to see themselves as perpetual victims of so-called systemic discrimination. As Spencer Klavan points out in his analysis of the fast-evolving political climate, “Wokeness in all its form is grievance politics.” Activists expanded DEI programs, decried America’s alleged systemic racism, and pushed for prison-abolition movements and reparations.
The behavior at teen takeovers is an outgrowth of the so-called peaceful demonstrations Black Lives Matter encouraged during the height of the George Floyd protests. Though the BLM movement has gradually lost traction — its corruption is widespread, and policies like abolishing the police are unpopular — its cultural influence endures.
Constant exposure to BLM has shown young people that if they commit wanton acts of violence en masse, they can get what they want. They can hop fences, smash windows, blast music, and brawl in the streets — and Democratic politicians will then attack peaceful citizens, demanding that they give away their livelihood and communities to correct “systemic injustices.”
The messaging BLM has promoted is irresponsible. Photos of cars, businesses, and school buses burning became regular fixtures online starting in the summer of 2020. Young people became convinced that, regardless of their lawless actions, they were morally superior to police officers and authority figures. They were taught that violence is a virtue because racism infects all public institutions. Teen takeovers are the result of a generation of children who believe that trashing public spaces is the righteous response of the unheard.
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BLM activists and “ICE Out” advocates have collectively turned protesting into an activity that’s considered as acceptable as going on a picnic. Young people are joining teen takeovers because they think they are owed the space to be violent, a lesson that Woke 1.0 normalized. For too many Americans, senseless rampaging is seen as a legitimate pastime for bored, testy teens.
This is a natural consequence of an America that has glamorized injustice. A recent study linked transgender ideology with increased support for political violence. Gen Z is more likely to attend protests, especially among those who support LGBTQ and climate-change movements. A similar study from the U.K. revealed that young people are more supportive of civil disobedience than members of previous generations.
The adulation of grievance politics culminates in a deeply nihilistic culture. The teen takeovers aren’t pursuing a righteous social cause — they’re aggressive reactions against civil society itself.
When previous generations protested, they mostly maintained a level of respect for their communities and even obeyed the law in some cases. But thanks to the radicalism of Woke 1.0 — pushed by BLM — young people don’t feel as though they owe anything to the people and places where they grew up.
They aren’t concerned with building a future or honoring their forefathers. The past decade of politics gave young Americans a permission structure in which anarchy comes with little to no consequences.
Americans have become accustomed to seeing entire city blocks burning, looting, and street fighting. The danger is that younger generations see disorder not as a public menace, but as the essence of freedom.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.
We graduated from Davidson College in 1982 and 2025, respectively. Connie serves on the board of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, an alumni group that supports free inquiry and sponsors student organizations including Young Americans for Freedom and Turning Point USA. Hannah interned with DFTD during her senior year, where we met. Although she majored in biology, her work with DFTD and other campus groups led her to the Oversight Project in Washington, D.C.
Our experiences, separated by four decades, have produced the same concern: Higher education is failing to prepare too many students for demanding careers and responsible citizenship.
The answer is not to replace progressive indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. It is to restore the conditions under which education can do its job.
Connie began seeing the change in 2015. For nearly 40 years, her career has involved preparing, interviewing, and placing college graduates in their first jobs. She saw a growing share of seniors arrive less engaged and less prepared. By 2020, retention among some of her placements had fallen sharply. One employer told her that of five Davidson graduates it had hired, two had been fired within 18 months and a third was on probation. She also found fewer students eager to test themselves at the start of their careers.
At Davidson, a DFTD review of public voter registration records found that 3.17% of faculty were registered Republicans, compared with 46.03% registered Democrats. Party registration is not a complete measure of ideology, of course, but the imbalance is hard to dismiss. When one outlook dominates, students receive fewer opportunities to challenge assumptions and defend unpopular conclusions. Davidson is hardly alone. Connie also serves on the board of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, a national network of alumni groups confronting similar problems.
Open inquiry is vital because employers value people who can think critically, absorb disagreement, and defend a position under pressure. Hannah saw the opposite at Davidson. One professor offered to help students find abortion services but did not mention prenatal or parenting resources. Another dismissed the possibility that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan laboratory. Several of Hannah’s professors canceled class after Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Those episodes sent a clear message about which views were welcome.
Professors also control grades, giving students another reason to keep dissenting opinions to themselves. Conservative students learn to calculate the social and academic cost of speaking. Students who echo the campus consensus rarely face the same test.
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Administrators shape the climate beyond the classroom. They approve speakers, recognize student groups, enforce conduct rules, and decide whether controversial events can proceed. Conservative groups at Davidson have repeatedly encountered restrictions that pushed events off campus, according to our work with DFTD. The point is not that every administrative decision is ideological. It is that vague rules and uneven enforcement teach students that permission matters more than argument.
DEI policy offers one example. President Trump’s January 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to end illegal race- and sex-based preferences and enforce civil rights law; it did not simply “ban DEI” in every college classroom.
The harder question is whether universities that formally changed policies continue embedding DEI concepts in curricula. In July 2025, the Oversight Project requested syllabi and course materials from more than 70 UNC-Chapel Hill classes. Faculty resisted the breadth of the request, and documents later surfaced through other channels. Months later, UNC System President Peter Hans adopted a systemwide policy treating syllabi as public records and requiring a searchable database.
Transparency will not settle every curriculum dispute, but it gives students, parents, and taxpayers a chance to see what public universities teach.
Anonymous bias-reporting systems raise a related concern. Maxient has said its platform receives about 7,000 reports a day across roughly 1,300 institutions, but that figure covers many kinds of campus cases — not 7,000 anonymous bias complaints. Bias portals are only one use. Even so, FIRE has documented hundreds of campus bias-response systems that invite reports about protected expression. Whatever administrators intend, systems that allow anonymous complaints about speech can make students hesitate before challenging campus orthodoxy.
Academic standards deserve scrutiny too. Davidson’s Class of 2025 profile shows that roughly three-quarters of seniors had GPAs at or above 3.5, the college’s threshold for cum laude. Harvard’s faculty has now voted to limit flat A grades to 20% of a course, plus four additional students, beginning in fall 2027. The policy came after flat As reached two-thirds of Harvard College grades. Elite institutions do not adopt measures like that unless grade compression has become impossible to ignore.
Meanwhile, national academic performance is moving the wrong way. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 35% of 12th-graders scored at or above Proficient in reading and 22% in math. Nearly half fell below Basic in math. Yet the National Center for Education Statistics projects colleges will award about 2.04 million bachelor’s degrees in 2025-26, roughly twice the 1989-90 total. More degrees are not a problem by themselves. The problem is expanding credentials while the preparation beneath them weakens.
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Employers see the consequences. In a 2024 survey commissioned by Intelligent.com, 79% of companies that hired recent graduates said they had placed at least some underperforming hires on performance improvement plans, and 60% said they had fired at least some. The survey has limits, but the signal matches what Connie has heard from employers: Too many graduates need basic workplace habits taught after graduation.
Weak preparation, inflated grades, and narrow intellectual environments also leave many graduates in jobs that do not require their degrees. A 2024 report from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute found that 52% of graduates were underemployed one year after college and 45% remained so a decade later. That is not evidence that college causes underemployment, and the figure varies greatly by major and internship experience. It is evidence that a diploma alone no longer guarantees a college-level start.
New York’s 13th Congressional District shows the civic stakes. In June, democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated longtime Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary. Chevalier attended Columbia and helped organize the pro-Palestinian movement on campus. She was involved in launching Columbia University Apartheid Divest, which seeks the “total eradication of Western civilization.”
Chevalier’s success cannot be blamed on the university alone, but campuses that teach students to regard their country primarily through oppression, grievance, and ideological conformity should not be surprised when some graduates carry those habits into politics.
This is why the problem is larger than a few offensive syllabi or one-sided classroom discussions. Colleges are supposed to prepare students to enter institutions they did not design, work alongside people who disagree with them, accept criticism, recover from failure, and distinguish argument from injury. Grade inflation, ideological conformity, administrative overprotection, and weak career preparation all work against those goals.
The answer is not to replace progressive indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. It is to restore the conditions under which education can do its job: serious academic standards, genuine intellectual diversity, transparent curricula, freedom to argue, and a campus culture that expects students to become adults.
Parents spend enormous sums on college, and students devote four formative years to earning their degrees. They deserve more than a credential and shelter from challenging ideas. They deserve an education that prepares them for work, citizenship, disagreement, responsibility, and life beyond the campus gates.
For years, Canadians who say they were seriously injured by COVID-19 vaccines have sought recognition from their government. This week, some of them are getting the opportunity to tell their stories on Parliament Hill — with a powerful U.S. senator joining them.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and one of Washington's most persistent critics of the government's pandemic response, appeared Tuesday at the opening of the Allison Inquiry in Ottawa.
'By the time the COVID vaccines obtained their emergency use authorizations, the cartel was firmly in control of the narrative.'
The four-day inquiry is chaired by Conservative Member of Parliament Dean Allison and organized with the Covid Testimony Association. Its stated purpose is to hear testimony from Canadians who attribute serious injuries to COVID-19 vaccination. It is being held on Parliament Hill, although it is not an official parliamentary inquiry.
Johnson opened his testimony by questioning fundamental elements of the public health response to COVID-19, including the treatment of natural immunity and doctors who advocated early treatment.
“Haven't we always believed that early disease detection prompts early treatment and produces better outcomes? Why was that fundamental tenet of medicine not only ignored but sabotaged?” Johnson asked. “Why were frontline doctors who had the courage and compassion to treat COVID patients from the start of the pandemic censored, vilified, and had their careers destroyed?”
“How could health officials deny the effectiveness of natural immunity when approximately half of the people testing positive for COVID were asymptomatic?” he continued. “Isn't that a sign that your natural immunity is preventing you from getting ill?”
Johnson has been pursuing many of the same questions in Washington as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
In April, the subcommittee released a 38-page interim report alleging that FDA officials failed to act on a newer data-analysis method that identified previously undetected safety signals that the agency's existing methodology had failed to detect.
The investigation drew renewed attention in July as Johnson's committee continued examining how federal officials handled reports of possible vaccine side effects and whether potential safety signals were adequately disclosed to the public. Later that month, Johnson requested transcribed interviews with Dr. Anthony Fauci and four former FDA officials about their roles in the pandemic response, including vaccine safety and efficacy
In August, Johnson's investigation obtained Fauci's government-issued cell phone, containing more than 34,000 text messages and 500 voicemails. Johnson and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) subsequently began releasing material from the phone as part of their continuing investigation into the government's pandemic response.
Johnson brought that investigation to Ottawa on Tuesday, where he used his appearance at the Allison Inquiry to deliver a broader indictment of the pandemic response.
“By the time the COVID vaccines obtained their emergency use authorizations, the cartel was firmly in control of the narrative,” Johnson said, using his term for the government agencies, pharmaceutical companies, media organizations, and technology companies he blames for suppressing dissent during the pandemic.
He recalled slogans including “follow the science,” “safe and effective,” and “no one is safe until everyone is safe.”
“Which, by the way, if the vaccines were that effective, why would you care whether somebody else is vaccinated?” Johnson asked. “I mean, it never made sense to me. ... These phrases were used ad nauseam to bludgeon the public into submission.”
Canada does have a federal program to compensate people who have suffered serious and permanent injuries following vaccination. The Vaccine Injury Support Program began in 2021 and was initially administered by a third party before being taken over by the Public Health Agency of Canada.
The program itself has faced scrutiny. PHAC terminated its contract with the original administrator after an audit found serious problems with its handling of claims. The agency subsequently took over administration of the program and renamed it the Vaccine Impact Support Program in April.
The Allison Inquiry says it received more than 1,400 applications from people willing to testify about alleged vaccine injuries.
Johnson also alleged that federal regulators failed to adequately investigate vaccine safety signals.
“A few months into the vaccine rollout, my investigations have shown that the FDA and CDC were not doing sincere safety surveillance,” he said. “And it appears this willful ignorance was a worldwide phenomenon.”
That question of what Canadian health authorities knew eventually brought the hearing to Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada's former chief public health officer.
During questioning, Conservative MP Ellis Ross asked Johnson whether Tam's name had surfaced in the millions of pages of federal documents obtained by his investigation.
“I've not heard of Dr. Tam. I may have, but, you know, the name didn't register,” Johnson replied. “What I will do is I'll have that as a search term with the emails and texts and I'll see. We'll check it out.”
Johnson then addressed his staff, telling them to add Tam's name to their searches.
“We'll put that in. We'll see if there's any [mentions],” he said.
Johnson went on to say his investigators were finding what he described as “a great deal of cooperation between Fauci and federal health officials and Chinese officials,” but said he was not yet prepared to disclose specifics.
“As we get more and more information, we'll start releasing that,” Johnson said. “We kind of got to put the whole package together, but stay tuned on some of those things.”
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