Democrats’ Maine mess puts insiders back in charge



"Inclusive.” “Representative.” “Transparent.” That is how Maine Democratic Party Chairman Charlie Dingman describes the process for selecting a new Democratic nominee after Graham Platner’s withdrawal last week from the U.S. Senate race.

Those are worthy goals. But can a process truly be fair, representative, and transparent when the voters who participated in the June primary will not directly choose the replacement nominee?

Maine voters deserve to know that their vote counts not only on Election Day, but throughout the electoral process.

Under Maine law, Democrats have until July 27 to select a replacement. Rather than hold another statewide primary, party officials will convene a nominating convention to choose the candidate who appears on the November ballot.

That means 601 delegates from Maine’s 16 counties — not the full primary electorate that selected Platner — will choose the replacement nominee.

Primary elections and nominating conventions serve different purposes. A primary gives every eligible voter an equal voice in choosing a nominee. A convention limits that decision to party delegates acting on behalf of the organization.

Both are recognized under Maine law. But they are fundamentally different processes, and the distinction is vital.

The question is not whether Maine Democrats are acting within the law. The question is whether replacing the primary electorate with a convention best preserves public confidence.

Transparency is important. But transparency alone does not answer the deeper question: Should voters or party delegates choose a replacement nominee after a primary?

The circumstances in Maine are unusual, but the broader issue is not.

Political parties across the country have rules for replacing nominees when unexpected vacancies occur. A replacement is necessary. Parties must follow the law. But they should also ask whether their procedures reflect the will of voters as closely as circumstances allow.

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Following the law is essential. Preserving confidence in the process is essential too.

This is not the first time Democratic voters have watched party leaders make consequential decisions after ballots had already been cast. In 2024, Democratic delegates, rather than primary voters, selected Vice President Kamala Harris after President Joe Biden stepped aside.

Regardless of where one stood on that decision, it raised an enduring question now facing Maine: When circumstances change after a primary, who should choose the replacement nominee?

Election integrity is often discussed in terms of voter ID, ballot security, voter rolls, and timely vote counting. Those safeguards matter because they help ensure elections are conducted securely and accurately.

But election integrity also depends on voters believing their participation shapes the outcome.

When the final decision shifts from the primary electorate to party delegates after voters have already cast ballots, voters are left wondering how much their vote truly counts.

That uncertainty fuels something increasingly common in American politics: cynicism.

A growing number of Americans have adopted a “black-pill” view of politics — the belief that participation is pointless because vital decisions are ultimately made by a small group rather than the broader electorate.

They’re wrong. Voting remains viable.

Yet every time a party shifts a consequential decision from the full primary electorate to a smaller group of delegates after ballots have already been cast, it becomes harder to convince people their participation makes a difference.

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Maine voters deserve to know that their vote counts not only on Election Day, but throughout the electoral process.

Election integrity is about more than secure ballots and accurate voter rolls. It is about preserving public confidence that voters, not party insiders, ultimately decide who represents them.

Maine’s experience should prompt lawmakers and political parties to examine whether existing nominee replacement procedures preserve voter confidence when nominees withdraw after a primary.

The question in Maine is not simply who the next Democratic nominee will be.

It is whether voters remain at the center of the process after their ballots have been cast.

The strength of an election is measured not only by how votes are counted, but by whether the voters who cast them still have the final word.

Jefferson’s line of revolutionary fire still burns



Thomas Jefferson wrote many letters to John Adams about government, liberty, and England’s corruption under King George III. Jefferson once put his disgust plainly: “It has been a strong reason with me for wishing there was an ocean of fire between that island and us.”

Earlier in their political careers, Adams had chosen Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson then penned a sentence that became the greatest line of revolutionary fire ever written, separating freedom from tyranny as clearly as any ocean of fire could.

With one line, the tyranny present throughout human history was turned upside down. Humanity knew real liberty in a new and enduring way.

During the classical era, pharaohs claimed godhood and treated their people as lesser beings, fit only for slavery and submission. Godhood placed the pharaoh and his ministers above the humanity beneath them.

But in the land of Goshen lived the tribes of Israel. Freed by Moses, they came to camp in the shadow of Mount Sinai, where they received the Ten Commandments — the law of God on earth, demanding obedience from kings, priests, and commoners alike.

Centuries later, democracies emerged along the Hellenic coasts of Greece, while the Roman Republic arose on the Italian peninsula. These societies were imperfect but freer than the empires around them.

In Greece, that freedom lasted until Philip II of Macedon devoured the city-states and left an empire to his son Alexander. After conquering Egypt, Alexander demanded to be known as the “son of Amon,” claiming the aura of godhood and exerting a tyranny like that of the pharaohs.

In Rome, the republic endured for nearly 500 years before falling to imperial rule. The Julio-Claudian line eventually produced Caligula, who demanded to be adored as a god in the Temple of Solomon itself. Thus came the tyranny of the Caesars.

In medieval Europe, kings could not claim to be gods. But they could claim to be anointed by God, placing their crowns above ordinary men as surely as the stars appear above the sea.

King John of England ruled through vis et voluntas — force and will. The rapacity of his will and the weakness of his rule led to Magna Carta in 1215, the first great liberating document written in Europe since the Roman Republic.

A descendant of King John, Henry VIII, placed in his own person the powers of king and head of the church. He claimed to rule by divine right. The kings who followed asserted the same claim: that all beneath the sun was beneath them by God’s will.

So it is that the history of humanity is, in large part, the history of tyranny.

Then a descendant of that line, George III, inspired Jefferson’s line of revolutionary fire: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

That sentence means all of us possess the same rights, and no one has a superior right to take them away — no pharaoh, emperor, conqueror, king, queen, or dictator.

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If our rights are given to us equally by God, then none may rule over us by claiming we are unequal. Among those rights are faith, speech, assembly, and the right to remove from power those who misgovern us.

Thus, our government is our servant — never our master.

By that one line, the tyranny present throughout human history was turned upside down. Humanity knew real liberty in a new and enduring way.

The foremost lesson of history is that tyranny is always with us.

In recent history, the murderous Bolsheviks toppled the 300-year empire of the czars, looted and burned churches, and murdered priests. They knew God would never be a socialist Bolshevik, so they placed themselves above God.

When Hitler came to power, he sought to eradicate the Jewish people, murdering 6 million Jews. He knew that neither the Jews nor God would join the socialist Nazi Party, so he placed himself above God.

In China, Mao Zedong drove the moral center out of his nation through a murderous purge, killing tens of millions of his own people in the name of revolution. Confucius had no place in Mao’s socialist order, so Mao placed himself above God.

Such is tyranny in our own time.

In America today, democratic socialists attack the faith of our Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens. They seek the removal of the Ten Commandments from schools and public squares. They attack Christianity and Western civilization. They insist that our nation under God is evil and must be remade.

It is socialism in America that must be defeated.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the greatest sentence ever written in the history of freedom, let us hold fast to God, the creator and guarantor of our rights.

Let us hold fast to that line of revolutionary fire with a will of steel — for the sake of all our liberties.

Democrats Have Completely Normalized Their Threats To Democracy

Republicans, take note: While it’s supposedly a major party foul to question the results of an election (at least when Republicans do it), it’s apparently just fine to undo the results when they don’t go your way. That should be really useful information going forward. A couple of prominent Democrats made those rules very clear […]

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ballot decision is a step in the right direction



In its coverage of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s recent cast vote record decision, Democracy Docket framed the ruling as a dangerous victory for “election deniers” and claimed it gave a “DHS conspiracy theorist access to 2020 election data.”

That framing misses the central point of the case: The court did not authorize the exposure of anyone’s private vote. It allowed access to election records that help the public verify whether reported vote totals match recorded vote data.

In a republic, ballot secrecy protects the voter. Transparency protects the result. Both principles can coexist, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court understood that.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons.

The court’s actual holding was straightforward: Cast vote records, or CVRs, are not the “contents of ballot boxes or voting machines” under Pennsylvania’s Election Code and therefore are not categorically exempt from public disclosure.

A CVR is not a physical ballot. It does not contain information about voters. It contains information about ballots — and ballots do not contain personally identifying information.

A properly configured CVR cannot link a ballot to a voter in a way that compromises ballot secrecy. In the Lycoming County system at issue, the data was randomized and did not contain personally identifying voter information.

The court explained that the CVR numbers do not correspond to the order in which voters checked in or cast ballots and that those randomization features “significantly decrease the likelihood” of identifying an individual vote. The court concluded that disclosure would allow the public to check the math without violating ballot secrecy.

There is a line of thinking that says a CVR can be kept from the public if there is some edge case where the voter behind a ballot could be reasonably guessed. What that argument misses is that ballot secrecy exists to protect voters from the state — not to protect the state from public scrutiny.

If a government builds or certifies a voting system that allows officials, vendors, or anyone else to identify which voter cast which ballot, the problem is not the citizen asking for public records and the remedy is not secrecy for the government. The remedy is fixing, randomizing, or decertifying the system.

If a county claims that it cannot disclose a CVR because the public could determine how individual voters voted by matching multiple records together, that should trigger an immediate and serious response from state election authorities.

A voting system that allows ballots to be connected back to voters is not merely inconvenient for public-records compliance. It is a direct threat to ballot secrecy.

Public access to CVRs is not about exposing voters. It is about allowing citizens to confirm that election totals add up. Bloomberg Law captured the ruling more accurately: Pennsylvanians may review raw voting records to ensure elections are accurate; the court said disclosure promotes trust, confidence, and legitimacy without violating voter secrecy law.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons. In September 2024, Gallup found that only 57% of Americans were confident that presidential votes would be accurately cast and counted nationwide, with a massive partisan gap: 84% of Democrats expressed confidence, compared with only 28% of Republicans.

After the 2024 election, AP-NORC found that about six in 10 Americans believed the presidential vote was counted accurately nationwide, while independents remained notably less confident.

In April 2026, Reuters/Ipsos found sharp partisan divides on election fraud beliefs, while also finding that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans remained confident their own ballots would be counted.

This is not a one-party problem. Republicans have raised concerns about mail ballots, voter rolls, citizenship verification, ballot harvesting, and machine tabulation. Democrats, too, have raised serious concerns about election technology when the perceived threat came from foreign interference or insecure electronic systems.

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After the 2016 election, the Clinton campaign joined recount efforts in key states, with Marc Elias writing that the campaign had examined allegations involving hacking, outside interference, and voting technology.

In the years that followed, prominent Democrats pushed aggressively for paper ballots, audits, and replacement of insecure voting machines. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s PAVE Act, backed by Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Tammy Baldwin (Wisc.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), and others, would have mandated hand-marked paper ballots and risk-limiting audits in federal elections.

Let’s be honest: Concern about election technology was not invented in 2020. Democrats were warning about electronic voting systems, paperless machines, hacking, and public confidence long before the current fight over CVRs.

In the case of Pennsylvania, election researcher Heather Honey asked a basic question: Can the public inspect the data necessary to verify the count? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court answered yes, subject to the election code and subject to the protection of ballot secrecy. That should be an easy win for anyone who claims to care about democracy.

Instead, Democracy Docket labeled Honey a “conspiracy theorist” and portrayed the ruling as a victory for sinister forces. But the court did not adopt a conspiracy theory. It adopted a transparency principle. In fact, the court said disclosure promotes “fair, honest, and transparent elections.”

I know Heather Honey as a hard-working, dedicated patriot, a wonderful person, and a loving parent. Her biggest personal failing, as far as I can tell, is that she is a Philadelphia Eagles fan — a burden no court can remedy.

The attack on Heather Honey is totally misplaced. If Democracy Docket disagrees with the legal reasoning, it should argue the law. If it believes certain CVR formats in certain counties could threaten secrecy, then the correct response is not to smear citizens who request public records.

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The correct response is to demand voting systems that protect ballot secrecy by design: randomized ballot records, standardized public CVR formats, and certification standards that make it impossible to connect a ballot back to a voter.

Marc Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket, has built a platform devoted to voting rights and election litigation. He knows better than most that election legitimacy depends not only on access to the ballot, but on public confidence that lawful votes are accurately counted.

CVR transparency is one way to earn it. It does not reveal who someone voted for or publish private voter choices. Properly handled, it lets citizens, researchers, journalists, campaigns, and watchdogs compare reported totals against underlying tabulation records. It is a public audit trail.

And if any county says its CVRs cannot be disclosed because the records would allow ballots to be matched back to voters, then the public-records request is not the scandal. The voting system is.

Democracy does not become weaker when citizens can verify government math. It becomes stronger.

So Democracy Docket should correct its framing, and Marc Elias should leave Heather Honey alone. She is simply defending one of democracy’s oldest and most important rules:

Trust the voters. Protect the secret ballot. And let the people check the math.

'Tribalism' is healthy — and America should embrace it



Somewhere between the 10,000th think piece about polarization and the hundredth talk on bridging divides, a strange consensus formed: Tribalism is democracy's deepest disease, its most persistent poison.

Professors and pastors warn of it. Columnists mourn it. Podcasters monetize their mourning. The diagnosis is always the same: Humans clustering together with their own kind is dangerous, primitive, a malfunction of the civic mind.

The people most loudly condemning tribalism tend to be surrounded by people exactly like them, at universities exactly like theirs.

Fine. But what if they're wrong?

Not partially wrong, but actually, foundationally, embarrassingly wrong — the way doctors were wrong about bloodletting or the way everyone was wrong about cargo pants being over.

Friendship by another name

Tribalism has an image problem. Many associate it with mob violence, ethnic cleansing, and mass unrest. But that's not tribalism. Not really. The base ingredient — people who share values and show up for each other — predates democracy, predates government, predates trousers. We used to just call it friendship.

My life runs on tribes. Boxing buddies on Tuesday mornings — punching things together turns out to be exceptional social glue. Drinks on Friday evenings with people who know my views, share my basic read on how the world should work, and will tell me honestly when I'm being an idiot. Football on Sundays: same faces, same complaints about the same referee.

These groups form through proximity, repetition, and the steady accumulation of shared in-jokes about Tom’s terrible parking. Nobody recruits anybody. The politics surface eventually, the way they always do — not as a pitch but as a mutual nod. Oh, you also think that. Good. Pass the beer.

Condescending critique

The anti-tribalism crowd conflates the existence of a tribe with hostility toward outsiders. But the two aren't the same thing, and they don't have to travel together. A group of friends who share values is not automatically a firing squad aimed at people who don't. The aggression that looks like tribalism is usually something else — fear, scarcity, manipulation by people with something to gain from the mob. The tribe itself is just the group chat.

There is also something condescending baked into the critique. The implication is that enlightened people transcend their loyalties. The sophisticated move is to float above any particular community, dispensing equal approval in all directions. This person does not exist. And if people like that do exist, nobody wants to live beside them, work with them, invite them to anything, or get stuck next to them at a wedding.

The people most loudly condemning tribalism tend to be surrounded by people exactly like them, at universities exactly like theirs, publishing in the same journals, citing each other's footnotes, all nodding along in perfect, oblivious unison. The irony apparently doesn't register.

Tribal to the bone

My ancestors were Irish. They were tribal to the bone, tribal by necessity, tribal the way people get when the alternative is disappearance. That tribalism — stubborn, clannish, occasionally violent, always inconvenient for the people trying to govern them — is precisely what produced the independence that eventually let them leave. Seven centuries of enthusiastic British imperialism tore Ireland apart. The tribe was the solution, not the problem.

America was the same story once. The founders were a tribe. So were the suffragettes, the labor organizers, the civil rights marchers. Every movement that actually changed anything was, underneath the rhetoric, a group of people who genuinely liked and trusted each other enough to take serious risks together.

As for the loneliness epidemic affecting the country, it didn't arrive because people had too many tribes, but because tribes became harder to build and easier to lose. Jobs moved. Cities got expensive. The bowling leagues, union halls, and neighborhood associations that once knit people into groups of mutual obligation slowly disappeared, and we got LinkedIn as a replacement.

Against this backdrop, telling people their tribal instincts are dangerous is useful the way a fire safety lecture is useful during an actual fire.

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Believe in belonging

What tribalism needs — contrary to the credentialed, conspicuously left-leaning, remarkably group-minded people writing op-eds about its dangers — isn't elimination, but better PR and a little calibration.

Think of the happiest moments of your life. They almost certainly happened with the same handful of people, in the same handful of places. Some of those people aren't around any more. That absence is its own argument — not for giving up on tribes, but for holding them closer while you can.

The alternative — atomized individuals, each navigating life as a fully independent unit, allegiant to nothing, accountable to no one — isn't utopia. In truth, it's just lonely, and loneliness radicalizes. Belonging stabilizes. This isn’t a controversial finding, but it’s certainly inconvenient for the people whose careers depend on pathologizing friendship.

Is mass democracy making society less human?



As politics becomes increasingly shaped by social media, mass messaging, and distant institutions, BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre is questioning whether modern societies have simply grown too large to be human.

And author of “The Master and His Emissary” Dr. Iain McGilchrist has an answer for him.

“More and more, our politics is this disembodied understanding. It is the thing fed to us through social media feeds and communicated through advertisements and headlines and these things. People feel like they know more about the world than they’ve ever known,” MacIntyre says.

“In reality, they know not even their neighbor or the issues that they face politically. And so these things have become completely disconnected. To my mind, the way that this is evolving is that we are basically becoming less human in all of our political interactions, making it very difficult for us to then understand the other as human, to understand the society and the world around us,” he continues.


MacIntyre believes this will precede a “collapse in our political systems” that will bring us back “to more of a city-state model.”

“Do you think that we can continue to see these large, you know, super-states expand and continue to lean on this idea that they have some kind of meaningful input from the individuals involved in their citizens, or do you think that ultimately we will have to contract and once again deal with each other at a much more local level when it comes to political organization?” MacIntyre asks McGilchrist.

“I do think we will need to do that very definitely if we’re to survive,” McGilchrist answers.

“We will have to rediscover the virtues of intermediate size,” he continues, pointing out that it may resemble the “downfall of a civilization.”

“But it might actually enable the regeneration of a much better way of life in which we lived with more modest demands on the earth, closer to the earth, cultivating the earth in common with our own community, sharing our lives with them, helping and supporting one another,” he explains.

“That would be a very different one from the one in which we are alien from one another,” he adds.

Want more from Auron MacIntyre?

To enjoy more of this YouTuber and recovering journalist's commentary on culture and politics, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The left says it loves democracy — so pass the SAVE Act



By requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections, the SAVE America Act reinforces a basic principle — that the right to vote in American elections is reserved solely and specifically for American citizens.

President Trump is right to prioritize the passage of this critical legislation, which is currently being debated in the U.S. Senate after earlier passing the House.

Indiana’s photo ID law treats everyone equally, without regard to race, color, or ethnicity. So does the SAVE America Act.

And nothing about this proposal should be controversial.

The nonsensical resistance to the SAVE America Act reminds me of similar opposition we faced in Indiana when — in 2005 — our legislature became the first in the nation to pass a law requiring that voters show photo IDs before casting ballots.

As Indiana’s secretary of state at the time, I championed the legislation from its inception. Once it passed, I was responsible for implementing it. And finally, I helped defend Indiana’s photo ID law over the course of four lawsuits — including one that wound up at the U.S. Supreme Court, where we prevailed in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

My question to the foes of the SAVE America Act is the same one I posed to opponents of our photo ID law 20 years ago. Namely: What don’t you like about secure, trustworthy elections?

The photo ID law treats everyone equally, without regard to race, color, or ethnicity.

So does the SAVE America Act.

The photo ID law simply makes sure that voters are who they say they are.

The SAVE America Act simply makes sure that voters are U.S. citizens.

Few factors are more essential to the survival of American democracy than popular confidence among the people in the fairness of elections and the veracity of their outcomes.

The left claims to revere democracy. Leftists remind us of their deep affection for government of, by, and for the people every time they baselessly claim that we conservatives are out to destroy it based on our supposedly unquenchable jonesing for dictatorial authoritarian rule.

If the leftists love democracy as much as they say they do, then why aren’t they the loudest and most enthusiastic supporters of safeguards like photo ID requirements or the SAVE America Act?

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Instead, they despise these common-sense measures.

To explain away their recalcitrance toward protecting the integrity of elections, critics say rules such as requiring photo IDs or proof of citizenship tend to disenfranchise certain voters — especially minority voters.

If they truly believe that certain demographic groups lack the necessary intelligence or resourcefulness to produce photo IDs or proof of citizenship — such as birth certificates or passports — then quite possibly they are racist to their core. And that’s reprehensible.

If they know better than that but are just plucking such concepts out of the air to rhetorically justify their stance, then they are disingenuous.

The charade should stop.

The Senate needs to pass the SAVE America Act now.

It’s a recipe for stronger election integrity, better standardization of rules nationwide, increased public confidence in elections, and better accountability for election officials.

“The people are demanding it,” President Trump recently said at a House GOP event. They’re right.

A free Iran starts with women in charge



The death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ruled Iran with brutality for nearly four decades, has thrown the Persian Gulf country into a historic moment of uncertainty — and possibility. His welcome passing shattered the familiar, oppressive order and forces a question Iran can no longer postpone: What comes next?

That question arises as Iran sits at the center of a deeper shift that may prove historic and generational. Much remains uncertain: how change will unfold, how long it will take, and what form it will assume. One principle, however, should guide every serious observer: Lasting change in Iran must come from within, driven by Iranians themselves and their organized resistance. Anything imposed from abroad or engineered through outside force will fail.

Iran’s destiny will be shaped by Iranians: by students, workers, professionals, and above all by women who refuse to accept a future defined by repression.

For more than four decades, Iran’s clerical establishment has displayed many vulnerabilities. One stands out as both defining and revealing: institutionalized misogyny. This is not merely a social failing. It is a governing doctrine.

That doctrine has become the regime’s weakness.

Women have been among the primary victims of Iran’s repression. They have also become the most dynamic force challenging it. Across the country, women no longer merely participate in dissent. They drive it. In city after city, they confront the regime’s most repressive forces. In many instances, they do not just join protests; they lead them.

One striking feature of this movement is its intergenerational character. Observers rightly note the youth of Iran’s protesters. But mothers march alongside daughters, and that image captures something profound about Iran’s national awakening: The demand for freedom is no longer confined to one age group or social class. It has become a shared national aspiration.

In moments of historic transformation, leaders emerge whose lives embody a movement’s aims. In Iran’s struggle, one such figure is Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran. For nearly half a century, she has been engaged in Iran’s fight for freedom. Her commitment is personal. She lost one sister to the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, and another under the rule of the ayatollahs while she was pregnant. Such losses would silence many. For her, they hardened resolve.

Rajavi’s significance lies not only in her story but in her vision. Over decades, she has helped cultivate a generation of women within Iran’s resistance — women who now occupy leadership roles, organize networks, and sustain activism under extreme repression. Tens of thousands of women affiliated with her movement have died in the struggle for freedom. That sacrifice, measured in lives rather than slogans, lends credibility to the movement she represents.

This is not symbolic inclusion. It is a structural transformation. Women at every level of opposition challenge the regime’s core assumption that power must remain exclusively male.

At the center of Rajavi’s platform is a 10-point plan outlining a democratic future for Iran. At its heart sits a principle the current regime finds intolerable: gender equality. In that vision, equality is not a concession. It is a foundation — essential to political legitimacy, economic progress, and justice. Women’s rights are not a peripheral demand; they are a declaration that a future Iran must break with decades of repression.

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Photo by Thierry Monasse/Getty Images

Sometimes a single image conveys what volumes of analysis cannot. Few signals would announce a new era more clearly than the emergence of a modern-minded Muslim woman as a central leader of democratic change. That would mark more than a political transition. It would signal renewal — a break with tyranny and a declaration that Iran’s future belongs to all its citizens.

History offers countless examples of societies that seemed immovable until, suddenly, they were not. Authoritarian systems often look strongest just before they weaken and most permanent just before they dissolve. The forces now stirring within Iran — especially the courage and leadership of its women — suggest the country has entered such a moment.

The lesson for the world is straightforward. Iran’s destiny will not be shaped by foreign intervention or external engineering — and it will not be served by fake leaders like Reza Pahlavi, who rely on social media and bots for relevance. Iran’s destiny will be shaped by Iranians: by students, workers, professionals, and above all by women who refuse to accept a future defined by repression.

Their struggle is not only national. It reflects a universal truth: The desire for freedom, once awakened, cannot be permanently suppressed.

The direction of Iran’s transformation is becoming clearer. And if history is any guide, when that transformation reaches its turning point, it will bear a defining hallmark: It will have been led, inspired, and sustained by women.

Blame bias, not Bezos, for the Washington Post’s downfall



The Washington Post just laid off more than 300 employees — roughly 30% of its newsroom — cutting back sports, local coverage, international reporting, and books. The paper has shed staff before, including a reduction in 2025 and voluntary buyouts, as losses piled up. Reports put the Post’s losses at $177 million over the past two years, with annual deficits topping $100 million since 2023.

Predictably, fired staffers and their allies blame owner Jeff Bezos for refusing to write blank checks indefinitely. They want the world’s fourth-richest man to underwrite their failing business model forever.

Downsizing isn’t a tragedy. It’s a market verdict.

But that’s not the story. The Post didn’t collapse because Bezos got cheap. It collapsed because its newsroom got ideological — and readers stopped trusting it.

The Post built its modern reputation on tough reporting and institutional seriousness. Then its editors and writers started injecting personal politics into straight news, smuggling advocacy into headlines, and treating dissent as moral failure. That approach earned applause inside the Beltway, but it bled credibility outside it. Readers left. Subscribers disappeared. Revenue followed.

Immigration coverage captures the pattern.

In 2018, the Post ran a story headlined “How Trump is changing the face of legal immigration.” The piece claimed an 81% drop in arrivals from Muslim-majority countries and a 12% overall decline in legal immigration, framing the change as a deliberate demographic overhaul. The story leaned on cherry-picked State Department numbers that covered only part of the admissions system while ignoring other federal data. The paper dressed activism up as analysis and called it news.

That same year, the Post published “U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question,” implying a broad campaign of anti-Hispanic discrimination. The story suggested “hundreds, possibly thousands” faced baseless fraud accusations tied to midwife-assisted births.

The piece ignored the long history of documented fraud in those cases and left readers with a clear impression: The Trump administration targeted Hispanics. In fact, denial rates actually fell under Trump — from 35.9% in 2015 to 25.8% in 2018. The Post later appended an editor’s note acknowledging errors challenged by the State Department. That kind of walk-back never repairs the original damage.

In 2024, the habit remained. The Post accused Republicans of “misleading ads” about the border while soft-pedaling the scale and timing of the Biden-era surge. It scolded language choices, such as “illegals” and “harsher,” framed enforcement as cruelty, and applied different standards depending on which party spoke.

This isn’t just an immigration problem. It’s a newsroom culture problem.

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Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The Post’s rush to judgment during the Nicholas Sandmann incident in 2019 showed how quickly narrative can replace verification. The paper treated a Kentucky teenager as a national symbol of Trump-era racism based on a misleading clip, then watched the fuller video upend the story. The Post paid an undisclosed settlement. The reputational hit lingered.

That pattern — moral certainty first, facts later — has infected much of corporate media. CNN, the New York Times, and their peers keep hemorrhaging trust because they keep selling ideology as “objective” reporting. They blur the line between news and opinion, then act shocked when audiences treat them as partisan actors.

That distortion carries consequences beyond subscriptions. When media outlets portray immigration enforcement as inherently malicious and frame routine operations as persecution, they turn policy disagreement into moral panic. They train audiences to view law enforcement as an occupying force. That mindset fuels the kind of street-level provocation that turns tense encounters into tragedy.

Journalism carries a sacred obligation: Tell the truth plainly, verify before amplifying, and separate reporting from activism. Too many at the Post treated that obligation as optional. The audience noticed. Circulation reportedly plummeted to about 97,000 daily in 2025. Financial losses followed.

Downsizing isn’t a tragedy. It’s a market verdict.

If the Washington Post wants to survive, it must rediscover objectivity — or keep shrinking until only its own employees bother to read it.

Here’s What Trump Means By Calling For ‘Peace Through Strength’

Peace through strength, defined by 'hard-nosed realism' over the 'utopian idealism' of a bygone era, is poised to yield both a popular and durable American defense policy.