A Democrat’s Road to Disillusionment

Even before she graduated from high school, Evan Barker was working in Democratic politics as a 2008 volunteer on Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She turned 18 just in time for the November vote, and the night Obama won was "one of the happiest moments of my life."

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The Obama tape nobody can seem to find



Seven days after the Benghazi attack, Barack Obama went on David Letterman’s “Late Show.”

The date was September 18, 2012. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were dead. The Obama administration was under mounting pressure to explain what had happened. The election was less than two months away, and the administration’s account — that the attack had grown out of a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islam video — was already under scrutiny.

We live in an age when everything is supposedly recorded forever. Yet political memory remains remarkably fragile.

So Obama went on Letterman. Naturally.

That was one of the more striking moments in A.J. Rice’s recent “Dangerous Laughter” conversation with Drew Thomas Allen, author of “Clinton Hoax, Obama Coup: The Declassified Story of the Trump-Russia Delusion.”

Allen’s larger argument is that the political and intelligence controversies that exploded around Donald Trump in 2016 did not begin with Trump. To understand Russiagate, he says, you have to work backward through the Obama years, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton, and the intelligence community.

But the Letterman story is where the story gets genuinely strange.

Allen says that while researching his book, he found references to Obama’s Letterman appearance in material connected to the Benghazi investigation. Finding the actual interview proved harder. According to the discussion, only a small portion of the September 18 appearance remains readily available online, while the section dealing with Obama’s explanation of Benghazi is the part that is difficult to locate.

Rice notes that plenty of Letterman interviews from the same period remain online. That makes the absence conspicuous.

The missing footage does not tell us who removed it, why it vanished, or whether anyone deliberately removed it at all. Television archives are messy. Rights change hands. Old clips disappear for mundane reasons. Rice and Allen themselves discussed trying to obtain a complete copy or transcript rather than treating the missing footage as evidence of a conspiracy theory.

That is exactly the right standard. But it leaves a remarkable question: Why is a presidential interview, important enough to surface in the Benghazi record, so difficult to watch today?

Rice’s hypothesis is compelling: The interview has been “memory holed.”

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EtiAmmos/Getty Images

The phrase comes from George Orwell’s “1984.” Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old records until yesterday’s reality conforms to today’s political narrative. The original disappears down the memory hole.

The metaphor works because political narratives harden into history with astonishing speed. A politician says something. Television repeats it, newspapers amplify it, commentators argue about it. Eventually, millions of people remember the story without remembering where the story came from.

Years later, the interpretation survives while the primary source becomes harder to find.

That’s the key to Allen’s argument, which treats Benghazi as an earlier chapter in a much longer political story. Obama was running for re-election on a record that included the killing of Osama bin Laden and the broader claim that his administration had confronted the terrorist threat. Then an American ambassador was killed in a terrorist attack weeks before Election Day.

That was plainly a political problem for the White House. What followed — the administration’s public explanation, the congressional investigations, and years of argument over what officials knew and when they knew it — became part of the larger history Allen wants readers to reconstruct.

His book moves from Benghazi through Clinton, the FBI, CIA, the Steele dossier, and ultimately Russiagate. A reader need not accept every conclusion to accept his basic challenge: Go back to the documents. Examine the original evidence. Do not mistake the version that became conventional wisdom for the record itself.

And that is where Letterman becomes more than a footnote.

Rice makes a larger point about comedy. Historically, the comedian played court jester: the figure permitted to mock the king, puncture pretension, and say what ordinary people could not. Aristophanes mocked politicians. Molière mocked the establishment. Comedy was supposed to make powerful people sweat.

Rice contends that Letterman had moved away from that role. In his telling, Obama was not entering a hostile room where a comic might spring an uncomfortable question. He was entering a friendly television environment where he could address a political crisis on favorable terrain.

That criticism can be overstated. Political comedy has always had sympathies and enemies. But the underlying standard is sound: If the comedian’s social function is to challenge power, the test should not change with the party holding it.

RELATED: Obama calls Benghazi attack a ‘wild conspiracy theory.’ Benghazi hero decimates him.

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And the timing is important. This was not a president chatting about his golf game. Obama appeared on a comedy program one week after an American ambassador and three other Americans had been killed, while his administration was under pressure to explain the attack and he was campaigning for another term.

Now the most politically relevant portion of that appearance is apparently the hardest part to find.

That should make historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens curious — not conspiratorial, curious.

We live in an age when everything is supposedly recorded forever. Yet political memory remains remarkably fragile. Archives move. Clips disappear. Context separates from quotation. Eventually, the easiest version of the story becomes the version everyone remembers.

That is the real reason the Letterman episode is worth pursuing. It does not prove Allen’s larger case. It does not prove deliberate suppression. It demonstrates why citizens should insist on access to the original evidence whenever possible.

If the full interview exists, produce it. If there is a transcript, publish it. If it truly has disappeared, somebody should find out why.

The memory hole is dangerous precisely because, once the source is gone, all that remains is somebody else’s version of what was on the other side.

Haiti suddenly went from 'GREAT ALREADY' to 'hell' now that Trump is sending back its people



The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that "hell is other people." Former Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera is among the bleeding hearts who believe that hell is Haiti — at least now that the Trump administration is repatriating its people.

Then

President Donald Trump identified Haiti in a January 2018 meeting as one among various "s**thole countries." This was, after all, then a failed state plagued by violence, haunted by rumors of cannibalism, and still reeling from a deadly earthquake.

'Ridiculous.'

There was tremendous backlash over Trump's remarks — not only from the Haitian government and the United Nations' human rights office but from Democrats and the liberal media.

Twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin (D) were among the many concern-mongers who claimed that Trump's vivid characterization of Haiti as a less-than-ideal nation was "racist."

In addition to similarly attacking Trump, celebrities ran a PR campaign for the Caribbean nation, portraying it as a paradisiacal place.

Conan O'Brien, for instance, aired a one-hour special showcasing Haiti's perceived beauty — a special that included refutations of Trump's "s**thole" comment from Haitian natives along with repeated emphases that the island nation was a "beautiful country."

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In subsequent months, others, including Bill Maher, jumped on the bandwagon, donning apparel that stated, "HAITI IS GREAT ALREADY."

Unfortunately, the situation deteriorated in Haiti before it got better — simultaneously confirming Trump's initial framing and prompting the liberal media to ramp up its gaslighting campaign.

When confronted — a couple of years after Haitian President Jovenel Moise's assassination — with reports that criminals had taken over the country's capital, freed thousands of felons from jail, engaged in systematic rape, forced the prime minister to resign, and threatened genocide, NBC News, for instance, reassured its viewers in 2024 that contrary to claims by "right-wing pundits," the Western Hemisphere's poorest country did not also have a problem with cannibalism.

Now

The Trump administration announced in July 2025 that it was terminating Haiti's Temporary Protected Status, having determined that the Caribbean nation no longer meets the conditions for special status, in part due to improvements in domestic safety and stability.

While the administration recognized that the country still suffers a "lack of functional government authority" and that "gang violence in Haiti persists," then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated that "the environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home."

This revocation of Haiti's special status — which has shielded roughly 350,000 Haitians from removal — faced multiple legal challenges; however, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the administration's favor in June.

Now that the Department of Homeland Security is "going after" Haitian migrants with suspended special statuses, the usual suspects have jettisoned their "HAITI IS GREAT ALREADY" framing and adopted the president's previous understanding of the Caribbean country as a loathsome place.

Geraldo Rivera, who asked Trump in 2018 to apologize for his "unfortunate" remarks about Haiti and other third-world nations, wrote on Sunday — in the wake of reports about the deportation initiative under way — that "expelling Haitian immigrants is sending them straight to hell."

Rivera was widely criticized for joining the chorus of liberals against the repatriation campaign.

Normalcy advocate Robby Starbuck wrote in response, "Didn’t the entire media and Democrats in DC swear that Haiti was amazing and wonderful and perfect when Trump called it a hellhole? Trump then said okay, then sounds like they can go back and now the framing switches to, 'it’s hell on earth, you can’t send them back!' Ridiculous."

Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project and Blaze News contributor, alluded to Rivera's previous concern-mongering over Trump's "s**thole," then asked, "What happened[?]"

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Deep-staters at FBI framed Trump firing Comey as a Russian op — then apparently worked to cover their tracks



More revelations about the Crossfire Hurricane investigation appear to show just how far the deep state was willing to go to frame Donald Trump as a Russian asset.

The FBI officially opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into supposed Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election on July 31 of that year.

'They knew what they were doing was wrong.'

The operation was a partisan frame from start to finish — launched on the basis of what federal prosecutor John Durham found to have been "raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence" at a time when "neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings."

Declassified FBI documents released by the White House on Wednesday show that an investigative subcomponent of Crossfire Hurricane code-named "Oxferd Comma" involved floating the baseless notion that President Donald Trump was acting on the behalf of the Kremlin when he fired then-FBI Director James Comey in May 2017.

The FBI appears to have strategically incorporated misspellings like "Oxferd" and numerical substitutions for letters in order to counter Freedom of Information Act requests.

Trump fired Comey for his handling of the investigation into twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for official public communications and Comey's perceived usurpation of the attorney general's authority on July 5, 2016, when he announced that the case would be closed without prosecution.

Another deep-state smear job

Among the newly declassified documents is a partially redacted internal memo that shows that a week after Trump fired Comey, Bill Priestap, then-assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division, directed the bureau to launch a full investigation "based on an articulable factual basis that reasonably indicates that President Donald J. Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Government of the Russian Federation which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States."

The memo noted that the new investigation — marked as a "sensitive investigative matter" and built on the "predetermined criteria set forth by the CROSSFIRE HURRICANE investigative team" — would determine whether Trump and others obstructed or conspired to obstruct any associated FBI investigation and whether Comey's termination was itself an instance of obstruction.

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The FBI memo quoted from an interview where Trump, discussing his decision to fire Comey, said, "This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won."

According to the memo, this "can be reasonably read to imply that the FBI's counterintelligence investigation was a factor in President Trump's decision to terminate Comey."

The investigation, the launch of which former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were made aware, continued until April 2019.

Now in August 2026, the White House is highlighting previously released documents showing that this operation was launched despite the notion of Trump being a Russian asset having "already been widely dismissed by agents and analysts working for months beforehand on the Crossfire Hurricane case."

For example, then-FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok said in a May 19, 2017, email to Lisa Page that his "gut sense" was that "there's no big there there."

The White House also pointed out that by the time the Oxferd Comma investigation was under way, the FBI "had also learned that the original allegations of collusion came from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, were funneled to the FBI in a dossier written by a former British spy named Christopher Steele, who was paid by Clinton campaign’s law firm, and that the Steele dossier’s contents had mostly been uncorroborated or debunked and were part of a political dirty trick."

FBI Assistant Director Ben Williamson said in a statement to Blaze News, "The weaponization that occurred against President Trump under prior regimes was inexcusable and wholly un-American. Director [Kash] Patel himself was the lead investigator who originally exposed the disgraceful Crossfire Hurricane scandal, and as director, he has released over 40,000 pages of documents to the public exposing similar malfeasance from former FBI leadership — a threefold increase from both his predecessors combined. As we’ve said repeatedly: Any individual who is found to have acted unethically or engaged in weaponization has been or will be fired from the Bureau and held accountable under the law.”

Everything in the dark

Jeff Clark, the vice president of litigation at the Oversight Project, suggested that "James Comey was well-known by his associates as liking Oxford commas, so they named the operation (clearly motivated by revenge in response to Trump firing Comey) as a hommage (Fr.) to their beloved Comey. But that doesn’t explain why it was deliberately misspelled as 'Oxferd.'"

"I’m going to go ahead and guess that they did that to deliberately frustrate future FOIA requests if anyone in the outside world happened to hear about what they thought was 'Operation Oxford Comma' and then go in search of the documents," continued Clark. Then the FBI could intake a FOIA request for that and say back truthfully 'Sorry, no responsive documents.'"

After poring over the documents, Clark discovered that in addition to misspelling "Oxford," the FBI "substituted in a zero ( 0 ) for an 'o' so that it’s not Comma, it’s C0mma."

"Totally designed to foil FOIA requests. It should be investigated as an obstruction of justice," said Clark. "You know, some real obstruction of an official proceeding. I consulted with a document expert. He measured the o-looking letter/digit in the document and concluded it was a zero."

Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project, told Blaze News, "They knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew that because it was wrong. Shame on them and those who cheered them on."

'We are the cat. And the cat likes eating mice.'

When asked whether his government watchdog organization frequently encounters clearly intentional efforts to hide documents with misspellings, Howell answered in the affirmative and noted, "Keep in mind that in the FOIA obstruction by Fauci adviser [David] Morens, it was our FOIA being obstructed."

"As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly," Morens wrote to the top scientists involved in figuring out where COVID-19 came from, including Peter Daszak, the disgraced head of the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance, which directed U.S. funds into the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

"Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone," continued Morens, "but not my NIH computer."

Howell noted further that "bureaucrats, particularly at high levels, are acutely aware that sophisticated investigative operations will target them. It is a game of cat and mouse. We are the cat. And the cat likes eating mice."

Editor's note: Mike Howell is a contributor to Blaze News.

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The media’s Democratic cover-up is collapsing



Democrats’ growing radicalism presents a danger to the country. Their shrinking ability to conceal it presents a danger to the party.

As democratic socialists and other far-left candidates win Democratic primaries, the mask of moderation is slipping. The establishment media can downplay radical policies when they belong to activists, backbenchers, or losing candidates. It becomes much harder when those candidates begin winning elections.

The Democratic Party’s greatest political danger is not that the party features a rapidly growing number of radicals. It’s that ordinary Americans are finally getting a clear look at them.

The Graham Platner debacle in Maine shows both how much extremism Democrats will tolerate and how long the media will help them avoid confronting it.

Platner was sold as an acceptable working-class populist. His carefully cultivated image as an oyster farmer obscured his privileged background and family support. He disparaged fellow veterans, blamed military service for a history of incendiary online statements, and sent explicit messages to women while married. His policy positions occupied the party’s farthest-left edge. Then came the Nazi tattoo and a series of preposterous explanations.

Democrats, their leaders, and sympathetic media outlets stood by him through it all.

Only after a woman publicly accused Platner of sexual assault did his campaign finally collapse. Platner denied the allegation, but leading supporters withdrew their endorsements, and he announced plans to leave the race.

The episode illustrates two problems: Democrats’ willingness to embrace radicalism in nearly any form and the establishment media’s willingness to disguise that radicalism.

The second may ultimately prove more damaging to the party.

How can appearance be more dangerous than reality? Because the Democratic Party has been moving left for years while much of the press assured Americans that it remained broadly moderate.

Bernie Sanders nearly defeated Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential nomination. Two members of the Democratic Socialists of America entered Congress with “the Squad” in 2018. Under the figurehead leadership of Joe Biden, the administration pursued diversity mandates, radical climate policies, uncontrolled spending, and an open southern border.

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The establishment media minimized those policies, just as it concealed Biden’s cognitive decline until his political usefulness expired. Once Biden became obviously unelectable, Democrat leaders and their media allies turned on him.

The same thing happened to Platner. The party tolerated everything until his liabilities threatened its electoral prospects.

In both cases, the candidate was expendable. The ideology remained.

Democratic radicalism is becoming more visible because the party and its media allies can no longer hide it. As more moderate Democrats lose primaries, the press must cover the candidates replacing them.

American political journalism has always preferred the horse race to the substance: polls, debates, endorsements, fundraising, and election-night results. Those subjects are more exciting — and less revealing — than sustained scrutiny of what candidates intend to do in office.

But the horse race becomes a problem when the socialists are winning it.

In 2025, self-described socialists Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson won the mayoralties of New York City and Seattle.

More recently, Mamdani-backed candidates swept prominent New York congressional primaries. Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman, while other left-wing candidates unseated Democrat establishment figures.

In Texas, far-left state Rep. James Talarico won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed has emerged as a leading contender in the Democratic Senate primary.

More victories may follow as the primary season continues.

Each one forces the media to cover candidates it would previously have dismissed as activists on the party’s fringe. As establishment Democrats disappear from ballots, journalists have fewer supposedly moderate alternatives to place in the foreground.

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The problem becomes even more severe in heavily Democratic districts, where winning the primary is effectively equivalent to winning the general election.

Those nominees are highly likely to enter Congress, join Sanders and “the Squad,” and pull congressional Democrats farther left. Their anti-Trump agenda will give them a national platform over the next two years, making their positions increasingly difficult to ignore.

The establishment media can soften the language. It can call socialism “progressivism,” describe government control as “investment,” and portray ideological victories as demands for affordability or generational change.

It cannot indefinitely hide what elected officials say and do.

That is the Democratic Party’s greatest political danger. It’s not merely that the party features a rapidly growing number of radicals. It’s that ordinary Americans are finally getting a clear look at them.

For years, the establishment media helped Democrats preserve the appearance of moderation while the party moved steadily left. Socialist victories are making that deception impossible.

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'The fact that he’s been able to bring some transparency to government is a tribute to his independence,' the senator said.

Hillary Clinton’s shocking admission about Trump’s plan: ‘First moment of honesty in her entire life’



In a moment few saw coming, Hillary Clinton offered shocking praise for President Trump’s proposed framework for Gaza — calling it a viable path toward regional stability and reconstruction.

“I’m going to say something positive about Trump,” Clinton began.

“Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza is actually a pathway to security for Israel, reconstruction for Gaza, and the possibility of self-determination, however defined, for the Palestinians. There are a lot of people who, you know, reject it because Trump did it. But it’s the only game in town. There’s nothing else,” she explained.


“I really believe if we took this 20-point plan, which starts with, you know, the disarmament of Hamas, a huge important step yet to be accomplished, but took all of the 20 points so that it wasn’t just disarm Hamas, and you know, maybe do some reconstruction, and you know, build some resorts on the coast,” she continued.

"But if you really took the whole approach that is embodied in the 20-point plan, and I know there are people who are working to try to move forward on that, there is a glimmer of a possible path forward,” she added.

“That might be the first moment of honesty in her entire life,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray comments on “Pat Gray Unleashed.”

“The fact that she even read all 20 points, much less is able to compliment them,” executive producer Keith Malinak says.

“That’s a big moment for Hillary Clinton,” he adds.

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Democrats are the party of the elite



For generations, Democrats have portrayed themselves as the party of ordinary Americans — factory workers, waitresses, truck drivers, police officers, construction workers, and middle-class families trying to get ahead. Yet one of the most striking features of modern American politics is how often Democratic leaders, activists, and media allies seem genuinely baffled by the very people they claim to represent.

The latest example comes from Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse, whose reaction to President Trump’s appearance at a packed UFC event on the White House lawn last weekend revealed a familiar pattern among America’s cultural elites.

Time and again, Democrat leaders appeared surprised that Americans cared more about grocery prices and border security than about the priorities emphasized by elite institutions.

To tens of millions of Americans, UFC is simply entertainment. It is competitive, exciting, patriotic, and increasingly mainstream. To Hesse and myriad other journalists and political commentators, however, its popularity seems to require explanation — as though they are studying the customs of a distant tribe.

That reaction says far more about elite America than it does about UFC fans, and few institutions better embody elite opinion than the modern Democratic Party.

The inability to understand ordinary Americans has become a recurring problem for Democrats. Consider one of the most famous campaign images in modern history. In 1988, Democrat presidential nominee Michael Dukakis climbed into a tank in an effort to project foreign policy credibility. Though the campaign intended the image to demonstrate Dukakis’ strength and command in order to reassure wary voters, the photograph instead became a political disaster.

To many Americans, Dukakis did not look like a commander in chief — he looked like Alfred E. Neuman from Mad magazine, wearing an oversize helmet and generally appearing out of his element. The embarrassing image became iconic because it captured something larger than a single campaign mistake: a cohort of American elites — consultants, strategists, and media professionals — who apparently thought the photo was a good idea.

The same kind of blindness occasionally appears among establishment Republicans as well. George H.W. Bush’s comments upon seeing a new and improved grocery store scanner became a symbol — fairly or unfairly — of a politician disconnected from everyday life. But while both parties have produced elite figures detached from ordinary concerns, the problem is far more pronounced today on the left.

Indeed, many of the institutions that now shape Democratic politics are populated almost exclusively by people who live, work, and socialize within a remarkably narrow slice of America. They attend the same universities, read the same publications, and live in the same metropolitan areas. They follow the same social media accounts. Their children attend the same schools, and their friends share the same political and cultural assumptions.

And increasingly, they seem unable to comprehend how other Americans think.

When Hillary Clinton dismissed millions of voters as a “basket of deplorables,” many Americans viewed the comment not as a gaffe but as a rare moment of honesty. It reflected a prevailing attitude among Democrats, and elites more broadly, that disagreement could be explained only by ignorance, prejudice, or moral deficiency.

President Biden repeatedly displayed a similar tendency. During the 2024 campaign (before he was ousted), he and his allies often portrayed concerns about illegal immigration, inflation, crime, and cultural change as either exaggerated or illegitimate, even as polling showed those issues dominating voters’ concerns.

Time and again, Democrat leaders appeared surprised that Americans cared more about grocery prices and border security than about the priorities emphasized by elite institutions.

Vice President Kamala Harris often suffered from the same disconnect. Her public appearances frequently projected the impression that she was speaking to an audience of policy experts rather than to working Americans — when she was not donning fake accents, that is. Her campaign’s struggles were not merely ideological; they were cultural. Many voters simply concluded that she did not understand their lives.

The pattern extends well beyond politicians.

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Leon Neal/Getty Images

Millions of Americans attend NASCAR races, pack country music concerts, and watch UFC fights. Elite commentators scoff and express bewilderment in response. Millions more display American flags, fill church pews, and worry about rising crime and open borders. Too often, the response from elite circles is not curiosity but contempt.

The Democratic Party once excelled at connecting with ordinary Americans precisely because it better understood their views. Franklin Roosevelt, known as a “traitor to his class,” spoke the language of workers because he wanted them to be part of the Democrats’ coalition for generations. Harry Truman connected with voters because he shared many of their instincts. Even Bill Clinton possessed an intuitive feel for middle-class anxieties and aspirations.

Today’s Democrat coalition increasingly draws its leadership from elite universities, media organizations, nonprofits, foundations, government bureaucracies, and professional-class enclaves. These institutions exercise enormous cultural influence, but they are not representative of America as a whole.

As a result, Democrats increasingly mistake the views traded in faculty lounges, newsroom editorial meetings, and Washington policy conferences for the views held around kitchen tables. That confusion helps explain their shock at one political surprise after another, especially Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024.

Democrat strategists express astonishment after yet another batch of election results defies their expectations. Panels of “experts” search for explanations, and reports are circulated that blame political circumstances or voters’ various “isms.” But the possibility that the Democrats have lost touch with ordinary Americans is rarely, if ever, considered.

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A political movement cannot represent people it does not understand. And it cannot understand the views of many Americans whom it increasingly views with a mixture of confusion, suspicion, and disdain. For a party that still considers itself the party of the people, that is a major problem it has yet to reckon with.

And it is also a problem for America as a whole. A healthy republic depends on officeholders who can understand — and respect — the culture and traditions of their fellow citizens, even when they do not share them. When America’s governing and cultural elites lose the ability to see the nation as it actually is, they make poorer decisions, deepen political divisions, and erode the mutual trust on which self-government depends.

A republic cannot long endure if those who wield influence come to view ordinary Americans not as fellow citizens to be understood but as strangers to be belittled and ignored.

Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at The American Mind.

6 Things We Learned From the Obama Center Opening Ceremony

The Barack Obama Presidential Center is finally open to the public. The Obamas threw themselves an invite-only launch party on Thursday with all of their celebrity friends. All the living former presidents showed up with their spouses. Joe Biden was also there.

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