‘Uncancellable’ turns one mother’s fight into a blueprint



When my documentary “15 Days” came out, I expected pushback. The film showed how American schools stayed closed long past the point at which honest people could defend the closures.

What I got was stranger. People asked me what to do.

Strangers in airports, parents at screenings, people who had never sat through a school board meeting in their lives — they wanted a plan. They wanted to know their part.

My second film, “Uncancellable,” is my answer.

The film is about Maud Maron. If you do not live in Manhattan, you may not know the name. You should.

Maud is a mother of four who has spent the last six years being told to sit down and shut up by every institution she belonged to. She has not sat down. She has not shut up. She keeps losing seats and titles, and somehow she keeps winning the argument.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

The argument is whether Americans are still allowed to think for themselves in public.

Maud was a public defender at the Legal Aid Society for more than 20 years. She started an advocacy group called PLACE NYC that defends screened schools and gifted programs in a city quietly dismantling both. She was elected to her community education council in District 2.

Then came the summer of 2020. Every progressive workplace in America held the same struggle session.

On a Zoom school board meeting that summer, a white board member sat with his friend’s black baby on his lap while making the case for keeping merit-based admissions at New York’s specialized high schools. Activists called him a racist. Letters circulated. Signatures were demanded.

Maud shrugged it off. She would not engage in identity politics, and she would not step down from her school board seat. For that, the lawyers at the Legal Aid Society called her a racist too. She was pushed out of her job.

She did not go quietly. She sued them.

In 2024, Maud introduced Resolution 248, which asked the council to examine the question of boys competing in girls’ sports and to put girls themselves in the room where the decision was being made. The council passed it. Activists followed her around. Council members who privately agreed with her said nothing in public.

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In 2025, the resolution was rescinded. Maud lost her school board seat in the next election. The activists declared victory.

Here is what they missed: Maud kept talking.

She is slowly winning in the culture the fight she lost in the room. A growing number of parents now say in public what almost nobody would say in 2020. That is partly because of Maud and people like her, who took the first hits so the rest of us would not have to.

In the film, Maud describes people coming up to her and saying she has the courage to say what they cannot. She turns the question around.

Why can’t they?

It is a fair question. Every parent who has watched a school curriculum get rewritten without input has felt this. Every employee who has rewritten the same Slack message four times to avoid setting off a colleague looking to be offended has felt it.

We are afraid. That fear is the whole problem.

This is what I keep telling people who ask me what to do: You do not need a national platform. You need a local one.

The school board meets this month. The PTA needs a treasurer. The neighborhood listserv has a thread about a new library policy. Your sister-in-law is about to pull her child out of public school and is too embarrassed to say why. Your son’s teacher used a phrase at parent night that made you uncomfortable, and you said nothing.

Start there. Speak up at the kitchen table first. Then at the school. Most of the people in your life are probably waiting for somebody to go first. You can be that person.

People love to say one person cannot change a country. One person cannot. A million ones can. That is what a force multiplier is.

RELATED: Democrats vilify NYC parents, demand they abandon request for policy review of transvestites in girls’ sports

Photo courtesy of Palladium Pictures

It is also why every authoritarian system in history has worked so hard to make the first person who speaks pay the highest price. If you can scare the first one quiet, the second one never opens her mouth.

I come from the Soviet Union. I know how that works.

“15 Days” and “Uncancellable” may look like different films, but they ask the same question: Are you willing to be the first one to say the true thing?

Both are stories about free speech and ordinary people who refused to stay quiet when their professions and neighbors wanted silence. The cost of speaking up is real. The cost of staying silent is worse.

Some people will tell you the country is too far gone for one Tuesday-night school board meeting to matter. They are wrong, and they are mostly the people who do not want you to show up.

Show up anyway. Bring a friend.

Maud Maron is not a celebrity. She is a mother with a list of opinions and a refusal to swallow them to keep the room comfortable. The cure for the country is more of her, not fewer.

It starts with the small, unglamorous habit of saying what you actually think, in the room you are actually in, to the people who are there with you.

That is the force multiplier. That is the whole revolution.

The campus race racket finds another killer to defend



When I heard that a black female Howard University professor of “communication” had written a Substack piece supporting accused murderer Karmelo Anthony and attacking the victim’s family, I was not surprised.

I regularly research this genre of racialist academia, much of it grounded in grievance, paranoia, and moral inversion. So I reviewed my personal library of pseudo-academic studies for what I already knew I would find about the author.

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

Sure enough, there she was: Dr. Stacey Patton, a prolific spinner of race-driven commentary who monetizes narcissism and paranoia for a rarefied audience.

Patton is typical of blindered black academics who contribute to the myth of ubiquitous black oppression in American society, a myth that now boasts its own literature. Much of systematized black academia has long been characterized by racial paranoia and self-regarding grievance.

This creates a paradox on campus. Mental illness in higher education is rarely identified and treated. Instead, institutions often nurture and encourage various maladies, even celebrating “neurodiversity,” especially when it serves ideology. At the extreme, grievance-studies enclaves become magnets for the like-minded, creating self-sealing provincial communities where paranoia and narcissism harden into conspiracy theory.

Consider Patton.

She contributed to “Presumed Incompetent II,” a key text in the canon of “poor me” paranoia and grandiose narcissism. Her chapter is titled “Why I clap back against racist trolls who attack black women academics.” This is classic main-character narcissism. Yet in its biography of Patton, Howard University modifies the chapter title, perhaps to make it sound more academic: “How Right-Wing Media Outlets Are Fighting Real Diversity in Academe.”

For narcissistic academics like Patton, reality can be edited as part of the self-regarding method. If needed, they can simply make it up.

Patton is hardly alone. The racialist canon contains countless articles and books with titles such as “Racial Battle Fatigue in Higher Education,” “Racial Battle Fatigue,” “Racial Battle Fatigue in Faculty,” “Black Fatigue,” and “Toxic Ivory Towers.” Patton, a “communication” professor and self-described historian, is an active participant in this paranoid fantasy. She defends her racialism this way:

Can you imagine people saying that a cancer researcher focuses too much on cancer? Or how about a climate scientist is suspiciously obsessed with climate? How about somebody saying a theologian keeps bringing up god? They wouldn’t. But when Black scholars study race, suddenly our expertise is some kind of pathology.

RELATED: Howard University professor’s wild take: Austin Metcalf’s dad is the real villain

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Genuine scientists are questioned all the time, and they are held to strict standards of method. Patton is not. The chief difference is that she has no discernible expertise unless she claims “identity” itself as expertise. The entire genre of narcissistic racialism rests on confirmation bias, selection bias, erasure of the distinction between fact and fiction, Orwellian manipulation of language, made-up “composite stories,” postmodern relativity of truth, outright fables, and rescue hypotheses designed to protect racialism from disconfirmation.

Most troubling, these dysfunctions are rooted in codified paranoia — the core of the racialist myth.

In Patton’s Substack piece attacking the father of murder victim Austin Metcalf, she distinguishes herself as a purveyor of communal narcissism. The piece is nominally about Karmelo Anthony. In reality, it is another exculpatory exercise for bad behavior.

She writes from the ideological hotbox known as Howard University, where the maladies of “poor me paranoia” and grandiose narcissism find a distinct genre of faux scholarship, especially among black female academics.

Howard has become a sort of academic “Love Boat,” the final destination for fading intellectual celebrities who could not survive in the world of rigorous scholarship and sharp criticism. It is the last stop for Nikole Hannah-Jones of the error-riddled 1619 Project; Ibram X. Kendi, scandal-plagued author of “How to Be an Antiracist” and failed director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of multiple empty autobiographical meditations on an unaccomplished life.

So no one should be surprised that a purveyor of paranoia plies her trade there. Howard offers a communal home for professionalized narcissism, and the symptoms are obvious to anyone willing to look.

One of those symptoms is “virtuous victimhood,” in which people story-tell themselves into victim status, blame others, then seek compensation or “reparations” for their declared victimhood. I have written extensively on this psychological phenomenon. It is the de facto resource-extraction strategy for the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, which I explore in “DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.”

Con men and grifters have more than their share of psychopaths. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior appears more frequently among academics than is comfortable.

The campus provides a kind of microbiology lab where mental illness can worsen, not encumbered by healthy introspection and certainly not by medical treatment. Here I refer specifically to the maladies of “poor me” paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder. Racialist oppression studies are grounded in both.

By “racialist,” I do not mean “racist” in the common sense, but rather in the neutral sense used by W.E.B. Du Bois. Racialists are consumed by race as the single explanatory factor and conduct their lives inside a race-driven fantasy. They view the world exclusively through the “lens” of race. When someone uses the term “racial lens” or “lens of race,” know that he is engaged in a resource-extraction con.

Patton monetizes her red-meat racialism on Substack, addressing a paid audience — a morally vacant fringe of black America, along with guilty white liberals — that is troubled, paranoid, easily duped, and easily led by grifters. The audience for this racialist niche literature is large enough for a quasi-academic to earn a good living. University of Pennsylvania professor John L. Jackson described this credulous audience in “Racial Paranoia.” Jackson, to his credit, survived Howard with his integrity intact.

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This does not mean racialists such as Patton lack passion, sincerity, intellect, or certitude. Of course they marshal facts, though often interspersed with claims that are doubtful at best and fabricated at worst. Evangelists for cults and extremist movements also exude passion, sincerity, charisma, and certainty. They weave fantasy and fact until the two become indistinguishable.

As I explain in “DEI Exposed”:

The technique appears to be to simply fabricate something, the more ambitiously egregious the better, to pass it off as fact, and then to circulate it with bluster, bluff, and zeal. It demonstrates the power of paranoid thought and action and repetition to achieve legitimacy as a ritualized “truth.”

Racialists are passionate about their faith-based ideology. Many are skilled persuaders. Some are talented tale-spinners. Others are crusaders with a burning sense of conviction.

That energy drives the racially aggrieved in academia — the vignettes, scenarios, composite stories, fables, and tales built around the assumption that whatever happens must be explained through the magical reality of paranoid ideology. The conclusion is predetermined.

As one passage from the academic literature puts it:

So long as the poor-me paranoid can maintain her strategy, she will retain a high self-esteem. She will be motivated to go to great extremes to maintain this — inventing the evidence, or concretizing ambiguous comments, expressing her beliefs in terms of absolute certainty, and, most of all, amplifying the enormity of the conspiracy against her, as would be warranted to persecute an immense talent.

Subclinical paranoia and narcissistic personality disorder provide the evaluative framework for this extremist slice of academia, whose growth accelerated after the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Unfortunately, a subset of black America, supported by “bad me paranoid” white liberals, buys into the infantilizing fantasy. In that fantasy, the faux persecuted are always absolved of responsibility, and a racialist enemy is always available to blame, no matter how tortured the explanation.

In 2026, however, we see signs of sobriety. Academia is growing less tolerant of dubious provincialism, and society is growing less tolerant of consequence-free violent behavior, even as Patton and her compatriots attempt to legitimize the murderous violence of Karmelo Anthony. Because of Patton and her ilk, we may see many more Karmelo Anthonys sacrificed before this tendency is reversed.

Stacey Patton and the racialist clique would do better to sound a warning than to cheer on racially justified violence that brings disastrous legal consequences and appropriate punishment. Patton’s next book is due in October and, of course, has a racialist theme: “Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children.” We shall see what she says.

I am not optimistic. The monetization of psychopathy is not easily remedied, especially when lavishly compensated careers depend on it.

What we lose when we mock fatherhood



To some in our modern society, the holiday celebrated on the third Sunday in June may seem archaic. Father’s Day may even invite calls to downplay or mock the role fathers play in our culture.

But the holiday provides important lessons in honor, respect, sacrifice, and long-term responsibility — lessons our 21st-century world badly needs to recover.

Father’s Day gives us an opportunity not only to recognize the imperfections of our earthly fathers, but also to honor and bless them in whatever small ways we can.

Consider the parable of the prodigal son, as Jesus recounts it in Luke’s Gospel. The younger son asks his father for his share of the inheritance, effectively seeking to end his relationship with the man who gave him life. Upon receiving his portion, he journeys to a foreign land and promptly squanders it in debauchery.

Our world provides far more opportunities for temptation than existed in the time of Christ, and many of them now sit in the palms of our hands. Social media, online gambling, pornography, and endless distraction are instantly available with a few clicks. Little wonder Western society seems more individualized and more alienated than ever.

Fathers, when they embrace their proper role, can stand against those prevailing currents. With God’s help, fathers can model upright living for their children and give them an example to follow.

As the head of a business founded by my parents half a century ago, I cannot thank my father enough for the lessons he gave my brothers and me. The Christmas I turned 13, he gave me a pocket-sized Bible. His note inside included these words: “The solutions to any problem are in this great book. Try to read a chapter each day of your life, and you will be happy.”

My father did not merely surrender his own life to Christ’s will. In his own way, he taught me to do the same — to pursue a personal relationship with God and try to align my life with God's word. The way my father loved my mother and lived his faith helped shape me into the man, husband, father, and business leader I am today.

A culture that devalues fathers threatens to leave future generations without the broader perspective and discipline they need to flourish — inside the family home and in daily life with neighbors, friends, and co-workers.

In his letter to the early church in Ephesus, the apostle Paul reminds children to “honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land.” By their nature, honor, respect, and obedience require sacrifice, traits our popular culture rarely celebrates.

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But I would not have done as well in my roles as a husband, father, and business leader without the discipline and values my father helped instill in me. Those life lessons extended far beyond the four walls of our family’s home and business.

Father’s Day gives us an opportunity not only to recognize the imperfections of our earthly fathers, but also to honor and bless them in whatever small ways we can. And for those of us who are fathers and grandfathers, it offers a chance to pass on the values our fathers — earthly and heavenly — have given us.

That may be the greatest inheritance we leave our children.

Every child needs to hear: Daddy’s here



Father’s Day can be complicated.

For some, it is a day of gratitude. For others, it is a day of grief, anger, regret, or longing. Some remember fathers they dearly loved. Others struggle to remember a father at all.

The best fathers point toward a greater Voice. The worst fathers cannot eclipse it.

Thinking about Father’s Day recently, a friend sighed and said, “I guess I’ll have to figure out a way to honor my father.”

The hesitation said more than the sentence.

Years ago, a caller to my radio program spoke of caring for his aging father, an abusive alcoholic who at that point required assistance. The caller was 52 years old, yet he confessed that whenever he was around his father, he felt 11 again.

The years had passed. The wounds had not.

Another friend put it more bluntly: “My father was a pedophile.”

No explanation followed. No attempt softened it. Just the stark reality of a life marked by a father’s betrayal.

I once heard a well-known minister recount standing at his father’s grave at 16, feeling as though he were losing his mind. Looking at the headstone, he cried through his tears, “You can’t leave. You didn’t tell me what you think of me.”

He was not grieving the loss of money, advice, or even protection. He was grieving the loss of a verdict.

For all our confusion about identity, one truth remains stubborn: People know when something essential is missing. Despite endless debates about who we are, millions spend their lives searching for the same thing — a father.

Men sire children every day. Being a father is something else.

A father forms. He blesses. He corrects. He protects. He teaches. He commissions. With a word, he can instill courage or fear. He can strengthen a child for the journey ahead or leave wounds that linger for decades.

A father’s voice can penetrate places explanations never reach.

Forty-three years ago, my wife awoke from a three-week coma following a catastrophic automobile accident. Broken, disoriented, and in unimaginable pain, she did not know where she was. She did not understand what had happened. She could not comprehend what lay ahead.

The first words she heard were spoken by her father.

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“Daddy’s here, Gracie. Daddy’s here.”

She did not know where “here” was. But she knew her father’s voice.

Years later, one of our sons fell on a playground and split his chin open. I rushed him to his pediatrician, where he needed stitches. As I held him while the doctor sewed him up, he looked at me with fear, confusion, and the unspoken question every hurting child eventually asks: Why are you letting this happen?

He knew nothing about infection, wound care, or why stitches mattered. No explanation I offered could bridge the gap between what he experienced and what I understood. So I kept repeating the only thing I knew to say.

“It’s OK. Daddy’s here.”

The explanation would have meant nothing to him. Presence meant everything.

There are fathers who leave too soon. Fathers who abandon. Fathers who wound. Fathers who spend a lifetime trying to repair the damage they have done. There are fathers whose voices still comfort decades later and fathers whose words still wound.

Many spend years trying to wipe their father’s face off God.

But Scripture does not ask us to measure God by our fathers. It asks us to measure our fathers by God.

Even when his only begotten Son cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the Father had not surrendered his authority, abandoned his purpose, or ceased loving his Son. The darkness was real. The suffering was real. But the cross was not chaos. It was the predetermined plan of God for the redemption of his people.

Life eventually leads all of us into terrifying places we do not understand: hospital rooms, funeral homes, gravesides, cancer centers, long nights, and hard diagnoses. In those moments, we want explanations. Yet faith does not require complete understanding.

The older I get, the more I understand how my son felt lying on that examination table. He was too small to grasp what was happening to him. He could not understand why I allowed it. He only knew I was there.

Living in Montana, I am reminded daily of how small we all are. The mountains were here long before any of us arrived. The rivers carved their courses before our names were spoken. The wind that sweeps across this valley pays little attention to our plans, fears, or accomplishments.

We are smaller than we imagine.

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Yet older than the mountains, older than the rivers, older than the wind itself, is a Voice that has never fallen silent.

When Gracie’s father sat beside her hospital bed and whispered, “Daddy’s here,” he gave a frightened young woman waking to a world she could not understand a gift beyond explanation.

But even that voice was only an echo.

Every good father is.

The best fathers point toward a greater Voice. The worst fathers cannot eclipse it.

When explanations fail, that Voice still calls to his children.

Perhaps that is why those words still move me after all these years.

“Daddy’s here, Gracie. Daddy’s here.”

In a frightened world, they remind me of a greater promise.

Britain is paying the price for years of woke ideology



When 18-year-old student Henry Nowak was fatally stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, a British Sikh, a horrific local crime quickly escalated to international headlines due to a catastrophic law enforcement failure.

Spurred by Digwa’s false accusation of racism, responding officers immediately handcuffed the mortally wounded teenager, even as he told them nine times that he could not breathe and four times that he had been stabbed. That Nowak was arrested and treated as a criminal while taking his final breaths has shocked and appalled the United Kingdom.

British institutions have traded the safety of their citizens for wokeness.

Bodycam footage of his harrowing final minutes also caught the attention of the U.S. government. The State Department warned on X that “ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline that must be rejected across the West.”

Two-tier policing refers to the public perception that British law enforcement operates under a double standard — treating suspects, victims, and protesters differently based on race, religion, or political ideology.

The roots of this bias lie in the policies established by the College of Policing (the official national body that sets training standards) and the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which coordinates operational policy across all 44 U.K. police forces. These two bodies introduced the highly controversial and censorious “Non-Crime Hate Incidents,” which legally requires British officers to log and investigate citizens for lawful speech if anyone perceives it as motivated by hostility — even when no actual crime has been committed.

In May 2022, in the aftermath of the global George Floyd protests, the College of Policing and the NPCC launched the Race Action Plan, explicitly designed to embed anti-racist training across the entire justice system. The plan’s 2025 update codified an even more racialized doctrine.

Official guidance now states that a commitment to racial equity “does not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind.’” By abandoning equality before the law, the policy instructs British police to treat individuals differently based on their race in an attempt to engineer equal outcomes. With law enforcement having absorbed this radical ideology, officers have become selective enforcers of justice, failing to intervene for fear of being labeled racist.

This is not a fringe theory. A new survey by the research group More in Common found that one-third of Britons now believe police actively favor ethnic minorities over white people. The chronic mishandling of the Nowak case provides further evidence of a system that despises the majority of its own citizens.

RELATED: America is done buying bogus racial alibis

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Governed by an anti-racism doctrine, British institutions have traded the safety of their citizens for wokeness. The fatal cost of this ideological capture was laid bare in 2023 when Valdo Calocane slaughtered three people in Nottingham. He should not have been free.

Psychiatric professionals had repeatedly refused to section the psychotically violent Calocane, citing concerns about the “disproportionate overrepresentation of young black males in detention.” Captive to the progressive view that any statistical disparity constitutes systemic racism, authorities left a violent, psychotic man on the streets rather than risk accusations of racism.

Tragically, this stigma also contributed to the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017 following a concert by Ariana Grande. Kyle Lawler, an on-duty security guard, witnessed the bomber, Salman Abedi, acting suspiciously with a heavy backpack. But Lawler failed to intervene or raise the alarm for fear of being branded a racist. Abedi detonated the device minutes later, killing 22 people — predominantly children and teenagers — and injuring over 1,000.

The Nowak case illustrates the same dynamic. Public criticism from Washington, combined with mounting protests on British streets, prompted pushback from Downing Street. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and senior Labour politicians vehemently rejected the two-tier accusation, stating categorically that they did not recognize the State Department’s characterization of the British justice system, a sentiment echoed by Justice Secretary David Lammy.

Starmer condemned the U.S. critiques, and even accused Elon Musk of overstepping diplomatic boundaries and attempting to stoke division on U.K. streets.

But in 2020, Starmer had no such reservations about commenting on American internal affairs following the death of George Floyd. He publicly urged then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson to address systemic racism directly with Donald Trump, openly criticized Trump’s response to Floyd’s death, and famously took a knee in a highly publicized display of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

Labour’s attempt at containment was exposed when Vice President JD Vance took to X. Echoing his powerful Munich Security Conference speech, Vance argued:

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. ... He would still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

Vance’s warning came days after a Sudanese asylum seeker was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder following a savage knife attack in Belfast, Northern Ireland — reported by the Telegraph as an attempted beheading. The victim, a man in his 40s, remains in serious condition after suffering significant injuries to his eyes, face, and back. Police stated the suspect is believed to have entered the U.K. by traveling from Dublin into Northern Ireland, where he had been granted leave to remain under a five-year visa.

The refusal to stem illegal immigration is a direct result of the policies of both main political parties. During the last six years of Conservative government, 128,000 undocumented migrants entered the country via the English Channel. Since Labour took power in July 2024, more than 70,000 illegal migrants have crossed into the U.K. on small boats.

Among those Britain is importing are individuals who despise the West and seek to harm its citizens. In the final week of January 2026, a Sudanese illegal migrant was sentenced to life imprisonment for the brutal murder of Rhiannon Skye Whyte, a hotel worker whom he stabbed 23 times at a railway station. Less than a fortnight later, an Iranian migrant pleaded guilty to sexual assault. In March, an Afghan asylum seeker received a 15-year sentence for the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old girl in a park.

For decades, uncontrolled immigration has been imposed upon the British public under the guise of multiculturalism, driven by successive governments in thrall to the liberal notion that diversity is a strength. This result has been social upheaval, rapid demographic change, and a society fractured into segregated cultural enclaves.

Expanding hate speech laws has effectively criminalized questions and complaints, leaving a nation paralyzed by fear and fueled by anger. JD Vance is correct to call this the politics of self-hatred.

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

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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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.

Juneteenth only makes sense if natural law is real



As a philosophy professor at a state university, I am surrounded by activist professors who use their classrooms to push DEI, LGBTQ, and decolonization agendas. They justify this by saying they pursue justice — one of the highest goals of education.

But America can remember chattel slavery as evil only because justice is not invented by activists, courts, or governments. Justice is grounded in the nature of man and the law of God.

Juneteenth reminds us that legal freedom came late to Texas. But the truth about human dignity was not late. It was there from creation.

Because of our founding ideals, Americans could fight to end slavery as an evil and a violation of natural law. And because many nations are governed by different ideas, slavery still persists in parts of the world today.

Juneteenth is not merely a celebration of delayed legal emancipation. It bears witness to a deeper truth: Chattel slavery was wrong before government finally acted against it. Moral law stands above human law. If America is going to remember Juneteenth truthfully, it must recover natural law and the Creator who grounds it.

Freedom did not create dignity

On June 19, 1865, enslaved people in Texas finally heard that they were free. The announcement did not create their dignity. It did not make them human. It did not suddenly endow them with rights. It publicly recognized what had already been true by nature: They were human beings made by God, and no man had the right to own them.

The tyrannical system that allowed slavery began in kidnapping and was propagated by brutal violence. Its laws were no laws at all because they violated the natural moral law given by God to all humanity.

Americans agree today that slavery was wrong. But why?

It was not wrong merely because Congress later acted against it. It was not wrong merely because public opinion changed. It was not wrong merely because the Union won the war. It was not wrong because history moved forward.

Slavery was wrong because human beings are not property.

Human beings have a nature that gives them a moral status no government creates. They are rational, moral, embodied persons made for duties before God and neighbor. Because of what man is, certain things cannot rightly be done to him.

That is Christian natural law reasoning.

Rights come from the Creator

Natural law begins with the insight that the good for a being is grounded in the nature of that being. The good for a horse is grounded in the nature of a horse. The good for a tree is grounded in the nature of a tree. The good for a human being is grounded in human nature.

This is why chattel slavery is not merely inefficient, outdated, or offensive. It is contrary to what a human being is.

A slaveholder may have legal power, social approval, economic incentives, and the capacity for tyrannical violence. But he does not have moral authority, because no human law can erase the nature of man.

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The Declaration of Independence does not say rights come from government. It says men are “created equal” and “endowed by their Creator” with “unalienable Rights.”

If rights come from government, government can redefine, restrict, or remove them. If rights come from social consensus, the majority can vote them away. If rights come from personal identity, rights become expressions of will and power.

But if rights come from the Creator, government is under judgment. The state does not create justice. It is accountable to justice.

This is why the Declaration was morally stronger than the compromise that tolerated slavery. The American founding contained a principle that condemned America’s own practice. Juneteenth reminds us that the principle had to be applied against the national sin.

The counterfeit of justice

Social justice activists want the emotional power of moral judgment without the metaphysical foundation that makes moral judgment possible.

They want to say slavery was evil. They want to say racism is evil. They want to say oppression is evil. They want to say injustice is evil.

But many of these same activists reject the Creator, reject fixed human nature, reject moral law, and reduce justice to power, identity, or social construction. The same people who say slavery is wrong also tell us that human beings can redefine themselves as animals, objects, or anything else they imagine. They appeal to the Marxist dialectic of oppressor and oppressed while denying the moral order that makes oppression intelligible.

Their view is incoherent.

If justice is socially constructed, then one society constructs slavery and another constructs abolition. If morality is only the preference of the powerful, abolition is not more just than slavery. It is merely the victory of a different power. If human nature is whatever we decide it is, human dignity has no stable foundation.

Juneteenth cannot be explained by moral relativism. It requires moral realism.

DEI as secularized religion

The activist account of justice is a Marxist counterfeit of Christianity. It keeps some outward forms but denies the inner meaning. DEI programs often speak in the language of justice, oppression, liberation, and equality. But they detach those words from the Creator and natural law. Justice becomes group equity. Sin becomes systemic power. Repentance becomes political re-education. Redemption becomes ideological compliance.

That framework cannot explain why slavery was evil in the first place. It can describe power relations, but it cannot give a final account of why oppressors are morally guilty.

The Christian natural law tradition can.

A right observance of Juneteenth should include gratitude for emancipation, repentance for national sin, honor for those who suffered, and moral clarity about the nature of justice. But it should not become a ritual of permanent grievance or ideological manipulation.

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America is accountable to God

The lesson is not that America is uniquely evil. The lesson is that America, like every nation, is accountable to a law higher than itself. When America violated that law, it was guilty. When America appealed to that law, it had the moral resources to correct itself.

Americans must repent of national sin and turn to Christ for redemption.

That is why Juneteenth should not be surrendered to radicals who despise the moral order that makes the holiday meaningful.

Juneteenth reminds us that legal freedom came late to Texas. But the truth about human dignity was not late. It was there from creation. The offer of redemption did not come late either. It is extended to all sinners.

The enslaved were human before emancipation. They had rights before government recognized them.

Slavery was evil before it was abolished. Justice was real before America obeyed it.

That is the lesson America needs now. We have national sins for which we must repent, and we must be clear that Christ is our redeemer.

Juneteenth only makes sense if natural law is real. And natural law only makes sense if a Creator’s justice stands above every court, legislature, plantation, university, and activist movement.

Marxist advocates can scream, but they cannot give a coherent account of justice.

Trump 2.0 puts religious liberty back on offense



One underreported achievement of President Trump’s first administration was the support the Justice Department provided to religious-liberty litigants.

During those years, the federal government filed statements of interest and friend-of-the-court briefs defending conscience rights at a pace unmatched by either of Trump’s immediate predecessors. Cases involving memorial crosses, conscience protections, ministerial autonomy, and the rights of religious schools all reflected a broader shift in posture from the Obama administration.

Constitutional guarantees are only as durable as the institutions willing to enforce them.

The federal government no longer treated religion merely as a tolerated private exercise. It treated religious liberty as a constitutional good worthy of affirmative protection.

That shift has only strengthened under Trump 47.

At the time, critics dismissed many of the administration’s actions as symbolic or temporary. What looked then like a change in tone now appears to have been the beginning of an institutional realignment.

The Justice Department’s recently released report from the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias suggests that the second Trump administration intends not merely to defend religious liberty episodically, but to embed those protections throughout the administrative state.

The point is not simply the report’s conclusions, significant as they are. The point is the scope of the undertaking.

Drawing participation from 17 federal agencies, the report catalogs hundreds of pages of examples in which religious Americans — Christians in particular — faced adverse treatment from the federal government because of their views on life, sexuality, education, parental rights, and medical conscience. The report and its 1,200 footnotes present reams of evidence to support its central argument: During the Biden years, religious exercise was often treated less as a constitutional guarantee than as an obstacle to the ideological objectives of a political machine.

A major development of Trump’s second administration has therefore been the construction of infrastructure around religious liberty itself. The White House Faith Office, the Religious Liberty Commission, agency faith liaisons, and now the Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias all reflect an effort to institutionalize protections that previously depended too heavily on presidential discretion.

This development is especially visible inside the Justice Department. During the first Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued welcome guidance for federal prosecutors handling religious-liberty matters and established the Place to Worship Initiative to address violence and discrimination directed at houses of worship.

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The current report builds on that framework. Rather than focusing only on isolated incidents, it argues that anti-Christian bias — and therefore hostility to religious liberty — became embedded in regulatory enforcement itself, especially when religious convictions conflicted with prevailing doctrines on sexuality, gender identity, or pro-life Christian opposition to the progressive sacrament of abortion.

The report points, for example, to enforcement disparities under the FACE Act. Pro-life activists received aggressive federal scrutiny, while attacks against churches and pregnancy resource centers received comparatively limited attention. Even when political pressure left the Biden administration little choice, its enforcement of the FACE Act against actual vandals went only as far as necessary to stem rising public complaint.

The report goes further, identifying conflicts involving military chaplains, foster-care providers, health care workers, religious schools, and federal employees who sought accommodation for sincerely held religious beliefs.

Whether one agrees with every characterization in the report is almost beside the point. The broader constitutional question remains unavoidable: Can government remain neutral toward religion while treating orthodox religious belief as presumptively discriminatory?

Historically, the answer has been no.

Religious liberty in the American tradition has never meant mere freedom of inward belief. The founders protected religious exercise because they understood that belief inevitably shapes action: education, charity, worship, speech, commerce, and public participation. The First Amendment restrains government not because religion is politically useful, but because conscience stands beyond the state’s authority.

That understanding has often been obscured in recent decades by a truncated vision of religious freedom — one that permits worship inside sanctuary walls while treating religious conviction outside those walls as suspect. Many of the conflicts cataloged in the Justice Department report arise from that narrowing impulse. The fight is no longer over whether Americans may privately believe traditional religious teachings, even explicitly Christian ones. The fight is whether they may live according to them publicly.

Judging by this report and other promising signs, the latest version of the Trump administration recognizes this reality more clearly than any administration in modern memory.

Critics argue that these initiatives privilege Christianity or collapse the distinction between church and state. But that has always been their schtick. Trump’s direct confrontation and dismissive rhetoric have exposed many modern assumptions about the “separation of church and state” as political slogans rather than constitutional arguments.

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The more important legal question is whether religious Americans — Christians and all people of faith — may participate fully in public life without surrendering core convictions as the price of admission. This report focuses on bias against a majoritarian religion. But imagine the damage if the state focused its ire on minority faiths. Religious liberty belongs to all Americans.

The administration’s trajectory is unmistakable. The president’s Religious Liberty Commission has been assigned with developing long-term recommendations for protecting religious exercise across education, health care, public funding, parental rights, and federal policy. The Justice Department report, which will continue to expand into 2027, serves as both justification and road map for that effort.

Critics will insist these measures are unnecessary because religious believers already possess constitutional protections. Only a cynic could look at the mountain of evidence in the Justice Department report and claim nothing happened. Those constitutional protections existed during the last administration, too, but we now know that officials chose political ideology over the foundational principles of the First Amendment.

Constitutional guarantees are only as durable as the institutions willing to enforce them.

The most important question, then, is not whether Trump personally embodies religious devotion. He plainly does not fit conventional expectations of religious statesmanship. The more consequential question is whether his administration understands the structural importance of religious liberty within the constitutional order.

Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes.

For religious Americans, Christians in particular, who spent much of the last decade defending themselves against the coercive power of administrative agencies, that distinction matters a great deal.

Who wants to eat a trillionaire?



Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a century ago. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

Last week’s SpaceX initial public offering made company founder and CEO Elon Musk the world’s first publicly known trillionaire — very different from all of us, at least on paper.

Bad enough he became too rich. Worse, Elon Musk became too independent.

On paper is doing plenty of heavy lifting. We’ll get back to that.

If billionaires “shouldn’t exist,” as our boring socialist friends never tire of saying, then a trillionaire must be not merely obscene but downright apocalyptic. If the existence of billionaires is a policy failure, the arrival of a trillionaire is a crime scene. Call Congress! Summon the United Nations! Eat the rich!

Let me tell you about the very left-wing. They are different from you and me. They enjoy little, and it does something to them. It makes them covetous where normal people are merely curious, bitter where normal people are merely skeptical, and stupid where the rest of us are trying very hard to be charitable.

Musk’s gargantuan wealth is a test no leftist can pass.

“If we liquidated Elon Musk as a financial entity we could each pocket $3,000,” one frivolous X user wrote. “Just putting that out there. 3K. Not bad.”

“Elon Musk is a trillionaire but it’s def the people on SNAP ruining your life,” a tedious Democratic strategist posted.

“Right? He could fund SNAP himself and still have a boatload left to spare,” a pseudonymous Marxist replied.

This is what happens when resentment collides with arithmetic.

“Elon Musk could easily fund” makes for a terrific party game, especially if everyone playing has skipped high school civics, freshman economics, and the day in third grade when Mrs. Campbell broke the news that Monopoly money was not legal tender.

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With $1 trillion, Musk could buy every major carmaker in America, Europe, and Japan. With $1 trillion, Musk could fund global famine relief dozens of times over, provide clean water to the world, rebuild Gaza, or hand every person on earth a modest cash gift. With $1 trillion, Musk could cover the United Nations’ humanitarian appeals, the Australian budget, or — according to my friend Mac Owens — roughly 3.5 miles of Gavin Newsom’s high-speed rail system.

Cool. Put it all on the board. Have fun. Pour another drink. (Maybe pour me one, too.)

But Musk does not have $1 trillion in a checking account. He is not Scrooge McDuck swan-diving into a vault of gold coins (not that it would even work that way). He owns shares in companies that other people believe are valuable because those companies build things, launch things, connect things, sell things, and promise things investors think may be worth a lot more later.

His wealth is not a pile of cash. It is a claim on productive enterprise.

The socialist imagination never really gets past the pile. The left sees wealth and pictures a dragon atop a hoard. It sees equity and imagines stolen bread. It sees a balance sheet and imagines a pantry that can be raided without consequence.

But Musk’s wealth cannot be “liquidated” without destroying much of the value the envious wish to seize. Sell enough shares, and the price falls. Seize the company, and watch the engineers leave. Convert capital into consumption, and the thing that made the wealth possible begins to disappear.

Welcome to Economics 102. Economics 101 teaches scarcity. Economics 102 teaches that capital is not loot.

None of this makes Musk a saint. I don’t know if he is a good man. I don’t know if any man should have as much influence as he has, and neither do his fanboys. Musk is erratic, strange, reckless, sometimes brilliant, and often his own worst enemy. But he is not a political theory. He is not a catechism. He is not your dad.

I know do this much, though: If Musk had not bought Twitter in 2022 for the eye-watering sum of $44 billion, Americans would know less about their own country and less about the people who presume to manage it.

That purchase did not make him richer. It made him more dangerous.

Dangerous to whom? To the people who think “misinformation” means information they cannot control. To governments that prefer pressure campaigns to open censorship. To NGOs that discovered a business model in laundering political speech control through the language of “safety.” To journalists who miss the days when a few institutions could decide which scandals were real and which ones respectable people were expected not to notice.

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This is why the hatred aimed at Musk is never really about money. The money supplies the moral pretext. Control supplies the motive.

The left does not hate Musk because he could “fund SNAP.” The federal government already spends enormous sums on SNAP, and no serious person believes American nutrition policy should depend on one weird rich guy hawking rocket shares. The left hates Musk because he took a portion of his unrealized fortune and bought a speech platform that was supposed to belong forever to the consensus managers.

Bad enough he became too rich. Worse, he became too independent.

A billionaire who funds the approved foundations may be vulgar, but he can be managed. A billionaire who underwrites lawsuits, climate conferences, university centers, “democracy” initiatives, and grants for people who use the word “equity” as an incantation may still be welcomed at the proper tables. His money can be baptized.

Musk’s money did something else. It bought the key to a door the regime wanted to remain locked.

No wonder they want to eat him.

The AI gold rush could become an incumbent graveyard



Thomas Jefferson warned that factions could subvert the public good once they captured the public councils. “Bribery corrupts them,” he wrote, and, “Personal interests lead them astray from the general interests of their constituents.”

That warning fits the data center fight now spreading across America. On this issue, the establishments of both parties have largely sided with Big Tech against communities that do not want their land, power, water, and quality of life sacrificed for the artificial intelligence gold rush.

Politicians who continue following the flow of corporate election cash may serve their puppet masters a little while longer. But the grassroots rebellion beneath them is growing.

The politicians appear to be betting that the campaign cash will outweigh voter anger. Are they right?

When I began covering the data center issue, opposition mostly came from scattered homeowners in rural communities. They fought these surveillance centers at county council meetings with rudimentary petition websites, homemade lawn signs, and four-figure local budgets.

Two years later, data center proposals have spread into nearly every corner of the country. So has the opposition. It is passionate, surprisingly bipartisan, and increasingly organized. A national election is also approaching.

Politico analyzed several dozen of the most competitive House races that will determine control of the chamber and found more than 200 data centers planned in those districts alone. In total, 1,500 data centers are planned or under construction in 232 congressional districts, although in my estimation, more of the mega-hyperscale facilities are in Republican districts.

That scale shows how ubiquitous the land grab has become. It also shows how potent this issue could be in the most consequential federal races.

Most competitive seats are held by Republicans, but many GOP incumbents have been cagey, even oleaginous, when asked about data centers. They avoid the issue as long as possible. When pressed at a town hall or by the media, they offer boilerplate about the need to “beat China” in innovation, then toss out an empty and impossible promise to protect consumers from higher electricity rates.

U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad (R-Minn.) gave Politico the cookie-cutter, split-the-baby response.

“AI data centers, like those proposed in southern Minnesota, can play an important role in both our economic future and our national security,” Finstad said. “At the same time, it’s important that communities have a full understanding of what these projects mean locally — including their energy demands, environmental impacts, job creation, and potential tax benefits. As we look toward the future of data-center development, we also need an honest conversation about whether our current energy infrastructure and power grid are prepared to support the growing demands of AI technology.”

OK, Brad. Seven projects are proposed in your district alone. Tell voters where you stand. Yes or no: Are you fine with Big Tech owning and repurposing this much farmland?

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Republicans face major headwinds this November. But if any issue could help them power through that adversity, it would be standing with their constituents against the Big Tech land grab.

The reason they do not is obvious. The campaign cash has to come from somewhere.

“They’re between a rock and a hard place,” Texas-based GOP consultant Brendan Steinhauser, whose clients have included Sen. John Cornyn (R) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R), told Politico. “Politically, it’s not a very smart move to come out and be seen as too close to Big Tech or doing the bidding of Big Tech, but a lot of the money is flying to them through that.”

Meanwhile, in one of the few districts where an incumbent Democrat is vulnerable this cycle, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) has actually listened to her communities.

“There’s more political signs against AI in our region than for candidates in the upcoming races,” Kaptur said during a hearing this spring. “The public opposition that is arising, it’s spontaneous combustion coming up from the grassroots.”

But no one should mistake that for Democratic seriousness. Nothing is as righteous as a Democrat in the minority.

Virginia is the first state this cycle where Democrats have already flipped the levers of government and taken power. Abigail Spanberger ran on reining in the shocking colonization of Virginia by data centers. Now that she is governor, her urgency has faded.

Some backbenchers in both parties have pushed bills to limit tax breaks, but Spanberger and her allies in House leadership are blocking real reforms. So far, she has created a blue-ribbon commission to study the issue — a panel stacked with industry hired hands.

In Ohio, lawmakers recently learned that Big Tech tax breaks cost the state $2 billion in just one year, exponentially more than originally projected. Despite the GOP promise to repeal those tax breaks, the relevant committee adjourned for the last time until November without taking action. Even the proposal on the table would only have reduced the abatement prospectively, yet the industry still lobbied against it.

That “rock and hard place” keeps doing its work.

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At the top of the political food chain, leaders of both parties are selling out to data centers. At the grassroots, voters on the right and left are fighting back.

In blue Maine and New York, legislative majorities passed versions of data center moratoriums. But Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) vetoed the bill, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) has so far declined to sign hers. The squeeze from corporate money gets tighter the higher a politician climbs and the more money it takes to win.

Conversely, small counties and cities have begun enacting local bans. Coffee County, Tennessee, and the city of McMinnville in adjacent Warren County recently passed 18-month data center moratoriums. Warren County, Knox County, and Nashville are debating similar measures.

Again, the opposition is bipartisan. Nashville is deep blue, but Trump won Coffee County by 55 points and Warren County by 56 points.

Left-wing environmentalists tend to oppose growth and therefore naturally oppose this sort of resource stripping. But grassroots conservatives also understand that farmland, rural heritage, local sovereignty, and digital privacy are worth defending. Sometimes those interests converge.

Politicians who continue following the flow of corporate election cash may serve their puppet masters a little while longer. But the grassroots rebellion beneath them is growing. It is bipartisan, local, organized, and increasingly impossible to contain.