The right is building its own lawfare defense machine — finally



For years, the right has rented legal capacity by the hour. This week, the Oversight Project is changing that.

We are launching a new law firm led by Jeff Clark and backed by a multi-million-dollar investment from philanthropist Tom Klingenstein. Its job will be straightforward: provide rapid-response representation to people we believe are being hit with politically motivated subpoenas, investigations, lawsuits, and professional disciplinary actions — and pursue lawful remedies against those who abuse those processes.

The next time one of ours gets the subpoena, the bar complaint, the investigation, or the lawsuit, someone will be there to answer it.

In practical terms, we are building something the right has long lacked: a public-defender-style legal network for our side.

With Klingenstein’s help, the project aims to raise $10 million over two years and hire at least 15 lawyers. Clark already has a small legal team at the Oversight Project. The new firm will expand that capacity, pair it with our investigators, and build specialized expertise in constitutional, administrative, ethics, and First Amendment law.

That’s the news. The reason for it is simpler.

You are not going to get the politics and policy you want if your political allies are in jail, tied up in frivolous proceedings, fighting for their professional licenses, or going broke paying lawyers. You certainly will not get durable policy wins if people who might otherwise enter public life decide the personal price is too high.

Politics does not require everyone to become a political actor, and it should not. Most people should be able to focus on faith, family, work, and community. But some people choose to step into the public fight on everyone else’s behalf. They need a fair chance to survive it.

Lawfare threatens that. The left has learned to move political disputes from the ballot box and public square into criminal cases, civil litigation, bar proceedings, subpoenas, and investigations. It also has a much larger institutional legal ecosystem — major firms, nonprofit litigators, advocacy organizations, and in-house lawyers — capable of imposing costs and absorbing them.

The right is better positioned than it used to be. Conservative legal groups have built sophisticated litigation shops. Investigative organizations have become more aggressive. Procedural challenges, public-records suits, and constitutional litigation are no longer unusual.

But one hole remains: institutionalized capacity to represent individuals at little or no cost when the process itself becomes the punishment.

The right’s usual answer has been a legal-defense fund: raise money and pass it through to private firms billing hundreds or even thousands of dollars an hour. A few prominent figures get help. Plenty of staffers, lawyers, activists, and public servants do not.

I have seen that firsthand. A friend of mine, a young White House official, received a subpoena from the January 6 Committee and an unfriendly call from the FBI. The quotes he received merely to respond to the investigation were far beyond his means. I represented him pro bono.

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Most people in his position do not happen to have a friend who can do that. We are renting legal capacity we should own.

Jeff Clark understands the cost personally. He was arrested and indicted in Fulton County’s 2020 election case; those charges were later dismissed. He was swept into the federal investigation that became special counsel Jack Smith’s election case. He was subpoenaed by the January 6 Committee. And his D.C. Bar disciplinary case remains pending.

Clark knows what it costs to spend years inside criminal, congressional, and professional-disciplinary machinery. That’s one reason he is the right person to build this.

The new firm will defend clients when subpoenas, bar complaints, investigations, or lawsuits land. Salaried, mission-driven lawyers inside a nonprofit can represent far more people for far less money than a model that depends entirely on outside counsel.

Defense, however, is only half the plan.

Pairing the lawyers with Oversight Project investigators means we can also find the records behind abusive conduct and pursue damages, fees, sanctions, and other lawful consequences where the facts support them. A movement that only absorbs blows will eventually be outspent and worn down. The goal is to change the cost calculation for anyone who believes legal process can be weaponized without consequence.

That distinction is critical. This is not a license to manufacture cases against political opponents. If we become what we say we oppose, we have built nothing worth defending. The answer to abusive legal process is aggressive, lawful representation backed by evidence.

RELATED: The right needs a public defender network for lawfare

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The firm will also build the next generation. We want young, hungry lawyers to get real responsibility early, work beside experienced counsel, and learn how to run cases rather than spend years carrying bags for partners. Lawyers who choose public duty over careerism should have a path to leadership.

For too long, much of the conservative legal movement has focused on commercial and regulatory questions important to major institutions. Other organizations have done strong work on the First and Second Amendments, education, abortion, and religious liberty.

We need that work. We also need lawyers ready to represent people fighting over election law, immigration, executive power, administrative government, and the emerging legal fights around populist and nationalist policy.

The left built a legal machine because it understood that legal infrastructure is political infrastructure. The right cannot keep renting lawyers by the hour and hoping donor generosity arrives after the damage is done.

That era is ending.

Jeff Clark and the Oversight Project are building a permanent institution to defend our allies and make abusive legal tactics more expensive to use. Judge us by the work.

But the next time one of ours gets the subpoena, the bar complaint, the investigation, or the lawsuit, someone will be there to answer it.

Death row goes DEI — and the execution still goes off the rails



America has been inundated with sob stories from female murderers over the past few months. First, it was Lindsay Clancy, otherwise known as the Exercise Band Executioner of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Prosecutors say Lindsay deliberately strangled her three children; she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Now after a mistrial, her lawyer insists there is a “total and complete lack of evidence” that smiling Lindsay killed them. A judge rejected that bid Thursday.

Maybe JonBenét Ramsey’s killer, who is still on the loose, climbed in the Clancy window and did what Mom is being unfairly blamed for?

Remember when drawing, quartering, and beheading were the only special treatments criminals got?

Recently, the soap opera moved farther south to Tennessee, a state that had not executed a woman since 1819. The convicted female death-row inmate in the news is 50-year-old Christa Pike, condemned for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer.

Pike’s lethal injection was scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. CDT. Concerned about being traumatized, Christa demanded special treatment at her execution.

Christa took diversity, equity, and inclusion to new heights by requesting that women handle the execution because of her history of sexual abuse. Her attorney later said it appeared Tennessee honored the request.

Remember when drawing, quartering, and beheading were the only special treatments criminals got?

Pike also challenged Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol because of her small veins and a blood disorder. Her lawyers proposed a central line or even hanging as alternatives. It’s a shame no one thought of Lindsay Clancy; she is both a nurse and a woman. If Pike had requested that wheelchair-bound Clancy be flown in from Massachusetts to tenderly place the IV line in the femme fatale’s arm — then if that had failed, who better than Lindsay to enforce the alternative?

Poor Christa said she had been living in constant fear, unable to sleep and hoping the IV would go in cleanly. She did not want to end up like Tony Von Carruthers, the Tennessee death-row prisoner whose execution was called off in May after officials spent more than an hour trying and failing to establish the required backup IV line.

After a day of appeals, a temporary Sixth Circuit stay, and the U.S. Supreme Court clearing the way for Tennessee to proceed, Christa finally found herself eight miles from Music Row in Nashville, in a sanitized execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, about to be ushered into Nirvana by the all-female team she had requested.

The curtain opened at about 7:27 p.m. Witnesses saw Christa strapped to a gurney and prepped for lethal injection. Pike received pentobarbital and remained conscious long enough to smile, move, and complain that her arm hurt.

RELATED: How groupthink replaces truth

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The curtain closed, reopened, then closed again. Witnesses could still hear Christa breathing and snoring behind it. Tennessee administered a second dose. That one didn’t kill her either.

Her attorney demanded that officials stop the execution and provide emergency medical care. At 8:53 p.m. — 86 minutes after the curtain first opened — Christa Pike was still alive, and witnesses were ordered out.

Instead of a hearse, an ambulance eventually shuttled Pike from Riverbend to a hospital. As of Thursday afternoon, her lawyers said she remained in critical condition receiving “life-saving care”. Gov. Bill Lee (R) halted Tennessee’s remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent review.

No one scooped Colleen Slemmer up on that freezing winter night in Knoxville and ferried her away. Slemmer’s unrecognizable body wasn’t found until the next morning.

Christa’s journey to Riverbend started on January 12, 1995, when she was 18 years old. The night before, she told friend Kim Iloilo that she intended to kill fellow Job Corps student Colleen Slemmer because she “had just felt mean that day”. Pike believed Colleen was interested in her boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp.

The next night, Pike, Shipp, Slemmer, and Shadolla Peterson left the Job Corps center together. Only three came back.

Pike later told Iloilo that Colleen had begged them to stop. Instead of mercy, Christa cut the 19-year-old woman’s throat, beat her, and cracked her skull with a piece of asphalt. Pike said a meat cleaver was used to cut Slemmer’s back and a box cutter to cut her throat. A pentagram was carved into Slemmer’s forehead and chest.

Then Pike came back with a souvenir: a piece of Colleen’s skull.

The next morning, with the skull fragment still in her pocket, Pike bragged to classmate Stephanie Wilson about the killing. Pointing to brown spots on her shoes, she said, “That ain’t mud on my shoes, that’s blood.”

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On January 13, a University of Tennessee groundskeeper found Slemmer’s brutalized body and testified that it was “so badly beaten that he had first mistaken it for the corpse of an animal.”

Pike was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to death in 1996. Her prison résumé did not improve. In 2001, she choked inmate Patricia Jones unconscious with a shoelace and was later convicted of attempted first-degree murder.

With execution looming, Pike’s lawyers filed a 226-page clemency petition. They said she was sexually abused by her grandmother’s boyfriend between ages 2 and 5, raped by a neighbor at 11, and raped again by a stranger at 17. They also cited bipolar disorder, PTSD, suicide attempts, and other mental-health problems.

Granted, if Christa’s accounts are true, they are tragic. But even all that does not justify one woman brutally torturing and murdering another woman. And then, three decades later, she had the gall to ask for women around her execution gurney to lessen the “trauma.”

In the end, it is almost as if karma circumvented compassion. After all the argument over who would touch Christa, how the IV would be placed, and how much suffering the state could lawfully impose, Tennessee gave her two hefty doses of the death drug and still failed to kill her.

Now Pike remains hospitalized in critical condition with a dire prognosis — which is considerably more medical attention than Colleen Slemmer received after Christa bludgeoned her to death.

Is ‘Islamophobia’ irrational?



“Phobos” is Greek for “fear.” In modern times, “phobia” has come to mean an irrational fear. Presumably a rational fear is based on a reasonable risk.

Is arachnophobia (fear of spiders) irrational? There are nearly 54,000 species of spider, but only 1% are dangerous to us. So a general phobia of spiders is irrational, but a fear of black widows isn’t. And there is a reason my Australian friends tap their shoes upside down before putting them on — funnel-web spiders like shoes, and they are deadly.

The risk of being a victim of terrorism is small. But if it happens in the West, it’s likely to be by a Muslim with Islamist motives.

The United States and Europe have seen plenty of terrorist attacks and murders by non-Muslims, but for motives that were political, not religious. For Muslim fundamentalists, or “Islamists,” there is no separation between politics and religion.

In this list of suicide bombings from the University of Chicago, the culprits appear to be nearly all Muslims, with motives that are likely jihadist. Muslims, with either premeditated Islamist motives or mental illness or a mix of both, have committed bombings, shootings, stabbings, and vehicle assaults in Europe and the United States.

Here are a few.

Europe

  • 2004, Madrid: Terrorists set off bombs in four trains, killing 191 people.
  • 2005, London: Four suicide bombers killed 52 people on three Underground trains and one bus.
  • 2015, Paris: Coordinated suicide attacks killed 130 people, notably at the Bataclan theater.
  • 2016, Brussels: Suicide bombers killed 34 people at the Zaventem Airport and a metro station.
  • 2016, Nice (France): A man drove a truck through a seaside promenade, killing 86 people.
  • 2017, England: Suicide bombers killed 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.
  • 2024, Germany: A man stabbed and killed three people and wounded more.

The United States

  • 2009, Fort Hood: A U.S. Army major shot and killed 13 people and wounded 30.
  • 2013, Boston: Tsarnaev brothers killed three people and wounded hundreds with bombs.
  • 2015, Chattanooga: A man killed five people at a military recruiting center.
  • 2015, San Bernardino: A couple shot and killed 14 people and wounded 22.
  • 2016, Orlando: A man shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 at the Pulse Nightclub.

The risk of being a victim of terrorism is small. But if it happens in the West, it’s likely to be by a Muslim with Islamist motives. Our educators, media, and politicians would pretend otherwise.

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The Daily Telegraph reports that in Britain, many of those too young to remember it are “barely aware of the context and the details of the [9/11 terrorist] plot.” Schoolteachers don’t teach the plain truth to avoid offending parents, allowing absurd conspiracy theories to take root — such as that the United States or Israel blew the Twin Towers up as a pretext to launch a war in the Middle East.

In a 2016 poll of 3,000 British Muslims, 31% thought the United States was behind 9/11. Seven percent said it was “the Jews,” and only 4% blamed al-Qaeda or Muslim terrorists. In America, no one 30 or older can ever forget what happened. But some of these students interviewed by Young Americas Foundation are unaware of who carried out the attacks and why.

True, most American youth are ignorant of all history due to abysmal K-12 education standards. Sometimes popular culture fills the gap. There are hundreds of movies, from “Apocalypse Now” to “Platoon,” about Vietnam. There are thousands about World War II.

But for 9/11, very few. An ABC miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” was shown once in 2006 and never again. It’s not available to stream, though I found a DVD on Amazon and a blurry YouTube bootleg.

In the U.S., any criticism of Islamism is quickly labeled “Islamophobia” by groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But there is no official, government-endorsed definition of that term. Americans’ free speech is protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution, but Britain and many other countries have only limited protection.

In Britain, the Labour government downplays Islamic extremism for fear of offending the Muslim votes it depends on.

The British government created a Working Group on Anti-Muslim Hatred to define “Islamophobia,” but they deleted all the comments and contributions by outside groups to the effort. Why? Critics allege that they would show Islamists were influencing the new definition, which could one day result in prosecutions. One Conservative member of Parliament warned the government that “there is a serious risk that this definition could lead to limitations on freedom of speech, criminalize language and prevent the discussion of religious ideas — creating a de facto blasphemy law.”

But of course, there already is a de facto blasphemy law all over Europe — with the possible penalty being death.

Written Islamic religious tradition prohibits depicting the Muslims' prophet. In 2005, the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten published cartoons that did so. Ambassadors from 11 Muslim-majority countries, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Arab League all protested to the Danish government. Street protests took place in Denmark, Australia, Canada, the U.K., the United States, and elsewhere.

Danish Muslim groups (unsuccessfully) tried to get the magazine prosecuted for blasphemy.

That year, the clear political cost of crossing Islamist red lines was made clear all over the West. Soon enough, so was the physical cost.

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In 2006, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo put a cartoon of the Muslim prophet Muhammad on its cover and reprinted the Danish cartoons along with new ones. In 2015, Islamist terrorists killed eight journalists and staff and two police officers at the magazine's offices in Paris.

In 2020, French teacher Samuel Paty was killed and beheaded by an Islamist fanatic because he had used a cartoon from Charlie Hebdo in teaching a class on free speech.

In 2021, a teacher in England used one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons to illustrate a lesson on free speech and blasphemy. Doxxed and threatened with death, he went into hiding and is still under police protection. The school suspended the teacher and apologized.

Salman Rushdie wrote “The Satanic Verses” in 1988. A year later, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini put out a fatwa (religious decree) ordering all Muslims to kill him and anyone involved with the book’s publication. Italian and Japanese translators of the book, and its Norwegian publisher, were stabbed by assailants in the following years.

Rushdie was protected by the British government at great expense. But in August 2022, while giving a talk in upstate New York, he was stabbed and nearly killed by Hadi Matar, a Muslim attempting to carry out the 35-year-old fatwa.

To have a fear of all Muslims may not be rational, but to have a fear of Islamism surely is. Trying to define Islamophobia so broadly as to limit free speech — and then ban it under threat of fines or prison — doesn’t make that reality go away.

11 years later, Trump’s immigration promises still aren’t law



With House Republicans effectively out of legislating time before November, the postmortem can begin on Donald Trump’s second governing trifecta and its immigration record.

After 11 years of promises, what do we have to show for it?

Whatever happens in November, Republicans have already burned most of this governing window. The question for the next time the GOP controls Congress is brutally simple: What will change?

More than nothing but far less than promised.

Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, expanding mandatory detention for certain aliens charged with specified crimes. The 2025 reconciliation law also poured tens of billions of dollars into ICE, detention capacity, border infrastructure, and enforcement personnel.

Those are real victories. But funding the machinery is not the same thing as fixing the law.

Republicans did not enact a permanent reduction in legal immigration. They did not end the diversity visa lottery. They did not define birthright citizenship in statute. They did not permanently defund sanctuary jurisdictions. They did not overhaul the removal statutes or judicial review rules that have turned nearly every major enforcement initiative into litigation.

Trump’s executive record is stronger. A Center for Immigration Studies analysis of Census Bureau survey data estimates that the foreign-born population fell 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026. The Congressional Budget Office likewise estimates that net immigration in its “other foreign national” category turned negative in 2025 after the enormous Biden-era surge.

Good. But that is exactly the problem with governing almost entirely by executive action.

The CBO estimates total net immigration at more than 10 million from 2021 through 2024. Against that backdrop, stopping the new flow and reversing part of the increase is not enough if the underlying statutes remain untouched. The next administration can erase much of the executive policy on day one.

The legislative ledger remains embarrassingly thin.

Trump endorsed the RAISE Act during his first term, a bill that would have sharply reduced legal immigration, curtailed chain migration, and eliminated the diversity visa lottery. In his second term, there has been no comparable White House push for an immigration moratorium or a permanent rewrite of the legal-immigration system.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the PAUSE Act last year to freeze most immigration until Congress addressed the system’s underlying problems. Republicans never made it a governing priority.

RELATED: The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.

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Meanwhile, Trump himself has repeatedly muddied the restrictionist message. He has defended the idea of bringing 500,000 Chinese students to American universities, talked about the need for more foreign workers, pushed to expand the H-2A program, and floated protections for illegal workers in hotels and farms.

Congress could have settled these questions in statute. It did not.

The same failure appears on removals.

The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 was supposed to speed removal. Thirty years later, removal policy remains a litigation magnet, and Congress has done almost nothing to rewrite the law after years of adverse rulings and procedural fights.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the obvious example. The administration alleges that he is affiliated with MS-13. His lawyers deny it. What is beyond dispute is that more than a year after his deportation to El Salvador triggered one of the administration’s biggest immigration battles, his detention and removal remain tied up in federal court.

That is not an argument against executive enforcement. It’s an argument against pretending executive enforcement can substitute for legislation. More than that, it’s an argument against executive acquiescence to judicial supremacy.

Consider the current court docket.

A federal court struck down the administration’s 75-country immigrant visa pause in August. The $100,000 H-1B payment requirement was vacated by a Massachusetts federal court, and the First Circuit refused to stay that ruling while the government appeals. Another judge gave seven H-4 plaintiffs limited relief from the administration’s decision to end automatic work-permit extensions.

A federal judge also temporarily vacated administration policies pausing diversity visa processing and later ordered the State Department to report three times a week on its compliance through the end of the fiscal year.

DACA remains in place for existing recipients even though federal courts have repeatedly found the program unlawful. Congress still has not acted to exclude illegal aliens from the census.

And the administration’s attempt to apply the 1996 welfare reform law more broadly to programs such as Head Start and other federally funded services was permanently enjoined this month after a judge found the agencies violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

Republicans knew judges would attack nearly every major executive immigration move. That was not a surprise. It was the operating environment.

Lower courts have constrained warrantless immigration arrests in parts of the country and ordered bond hearings in individual detention cases. They also blocked the administration’s third-country-removal policy for months. On September 29, the Supreme Court stayed that order and agreed to hear the case in December.

Even when the administration ultimately gets relief, the clock keeps running.

That is why Republicans should have spent their trifecta doing two things simultaneously: enforcing the law with every lawful executive tool available and rewriting the law so that the next administration could not simply erase the policy.

They did plenty of the first. They barely attempted the second.

For example, Roy and other immigration hawks spent 2025 urging Republicans to limit judicial review in removal cases and use must-pass legislation to lock enforcement changes into statute. They got no support from the administration, and those proposals died on the vine.

RELATED: Kansas Republicans muddy the waters on ICE enforcement

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That failure is vastly more consequential than yet another White House press release announcing an executive initiative.

Executive orders expire. Agency rules get rescinded. Guidance memoranda disappear. Prosecutorial priorities flip. Lower courts can delay policies for months or years. A statute forces the next administration to confront an actual law rather than delete its predecessor’s memo.

That was supposed to be the point of winning Congress.

Eleven years after Trump descended the escalator and made immigration the defining issue of Republican politics, the United States has more enforcement resources and a much tighter border than it did two years ago. Those achievements are real — but temporary. The basic architecture that produced the Biden-era surge remains largely intact.

Whatever happens in November, Republicans have already burned most of this governing window. The question for the next time the GOP controls Congress is brutally simple: What will change?

If the answer is another collection of executive orders followed by another collection of injunctions, then we have truly learned nothing. Immigration policy will remain a leftward ratchet: Democrats expand migration, Republicans temporarily slow it, and almost none of the restrictions survive the next change of power.

Gavin Newsom invoked Nietzsche. I thought of ‘Blazing Saddles.’



Until recently, everything I knew about Friedrich Nietzsche came from two movies.

“The Abyss” opens with his warning that when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back. My other exposure came from “Blazing Saddles.” During a chaotic town meeting, Howard Johnson tries to elevate the proceedings.

A compelling why does not make the why righteous. Conviction supplies endurance. It does not supply morality.

“You know, Nietzsche says, ‘Out of chaos comes order.’”

Olson Johnson replies, “Oh, blow it out your ass, Howard.”

Mel Brooks provided the more memorable lesson.

So when California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) quoted Nietzsche while discussing a possible presidential run, I thought of Olson Johnson immediately.

In a PBS "NewsHour" interview, Newsom was asked what might keep him from running in 2028. He answered that he would need a “big enough why” to endure almost any “how,” invoking Nietzsche, and said he would have to look voters in the eye with a compelling vision.

When a governor reaching for the White House quotes Nietzsche on endurance, he is not confessing limits. He is announcing appetite.

I am not a Nietzsche scholar. I am a caregiver. I have spent 40 years straining against the limits of my own power, and I have learned how easily “responsibility” becomes a contest of wills. I have wanted the last word at home and called it love. Fatigue cooled that appetite more than virtue ever did.

I have enough trouble governing myself. Men eager to govern everybody else no longer impress me. They weary me.

Newsom has been busy making the rounds. He went fly-fishing in Montana with Jake Tapper and talked about 2028. He spoke at the United Nations. He met with fire survivors in Altadena.

None of that is scandalous. Ambitious governors do ambitious-governor things. But California has already handed Newsom a why.

Only 19% of California households could afford the state’s median-priced existing single-family home in the second quarter of 2026. The median price was $916,750, and a household needed an annual income of $228,400 to qualify for the typical payment.

People still sleep outside. Fire survivors are still rebuilding. And U-Haul ranked California last among the states for net one-way customer growth in 2025 — the sixth straight year it finished at the bottom.

When U-Haul starts sending thank-you notes to the governor, he ought to ask why.

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We call it public service. How often is it public power wearing better clothes? A compelling why does not make the why righteous. Conviction supplies endurance. It does not supply morality.

To be fair to Newsom, the aphorism is genuinely Nietzsche’s. It appears in “Twilight of the Idols.” Quoting it does not make Newsom a disciple of Nietzsche any more than quoting G.K. Chesterton makes me … well, Chesterton.

But the actual Nietzsche was less greeting-card. In “The Antichrist,” he asks, “What is good?” and answers: “Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.” At least he labeled the package.

The desire for a bigger seat is neither new nor rare. Jesus had just told His disciples that He would be condemned, flogged, and killed when James and John asked for the seats at His right and left.

“You do not know what you are asking,” He told them. The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over others, but "it shall not be so among you.” Whoever would be great must become a servant. Then He spoke of giving His own life as a ransom.

James and John wanted the best seats in the kingdom. At Calvary, the places on His right and left went to two criminals. That was not the seating chart they had in mind.

In the middle of the night, when someone is hurting and a dressing needs changing, nobody cares how important I think I am. No podium waits. No national why arrives. There is only the next necessary thing: wash the wound, change the dressing, dry the tears, do the laundry, get out the mop.

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Politicians who cannot stand work at that scale keep looking for a bigger room so that the work can stay abstract. Nietzsche offers me nothing in those hours. Christ offers everything.

Chesterton wrote that original sin is “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” I do not need Washington to test the claim. I provide evidence myself. So do men who cannot sit still in the office they already hold.

If Newsom wants to look voters in the eye, he already has people in front of him. Californians gave him a job, a mighty how, and enough need to exhaust any honest servant.

If he still needs a bigger why, that tells me something about which hunger is doing the asking.

Olson Johnson had the right response the first time.

Democrats are desperate to 'Europe' our health care system



European-style health care mandates are the latest fringe policies from the Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists of America. Packaged as “Medicare for Ya’ll” and “universal care,” these extreme plans from politicians like James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed push control of health care to the government and away from patients and their providers.

With Talarico recently walking back some of his more controversial statements, Texans should take a hard look at how he is missing the mark on health care policy and urge him and state politicians to keep radical, European-style health care out of the state House and out of Congress.

We don’t have to look far to know what happens when government takes control of our health care.

The dangers of European-style health care policies are currently playing out across the pond. The National Health Service in England reports that waiting lists for patients have ballooned to over 7 million cases, including patients with serious and life-threatening medical conditions like cancer and heart disease.

Nearly 80,000 patients were removed from the waitlist between 2024 and 2025, not because they received care but because they died.

The promise of improved care simply doesn’t bear out when European-style policies are put into practice, yet Democrats in America are doubling down on more government intervention rather than innovation and reform.

When government boards and committees control health care decisions, there is no free market competition and no incentive to innovate. It takes nearly 20 months in Europe before patients can access a new drug once it is approved.

Why would we import these failed policies to our country?

In 2020, Americans watched as presidential contenders proposed and then abandoned European-style proposals after failing to articulate a clear vision for how the system would be implemented.

Democrats are currently recycling those same bad ideas for the midterms, only this time they are fueled by the socialist craze to force government on every aspect of American life.

RELATED: The DSA’s history lesson has one big omission

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Americans should send a message that a government-controlled health care monopoly is not the answer. Already, bloated government health care programs fuel waste and abuse in the American health care system. The runaway 340B program is the perfect example.

Launched more than 30 years ago as a way to help safety-net providers and hospitals serve low-income patients, the program has gradually ballooned into a revenue stream that allows hospitals to purchase drugs at steep discounts and then charge insurers full price.

The Government Accountability Office has warned about insufficient oversight and improper use among hospital participants. There’s no accountability mechanism to ensure that the savings are used for charity care or passed on to low-income patients. As the program has grown, so has the waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Trump administration has made efforts to tackle the rampant abuse in the system, but Congress needs to act in order to enact lasting change. The Democrat response is more government control and health care expansion, bringing us one step closer to Europe’s harmful health care policies and further away from meaningful reforms.

States must reject attempts to import failed European health policies and government control into our health care system. Texans and Michiganders should push back against the socialist agenda that glorifies waitlists, price controls, and drug rationing over patient care.

We don’t have to look far to know what happens when government takes control of our health care. Americans need to send a clear message during the midterms: Don’t Europe our health care.

The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.



Voters were not confused about what they were choosing in 2024. "Mass deportation" was not a line buried in a white paper. It was printed on signs, chanted at rallies, and repeated by the candidate himself. Americans who cast their ballots on that promise had every reason to believe it meant what it said.

Nearly two years into this administration, it is fair to ask whether that promise is being kept. By the government's own numbers, it is falling short. Those numbers are not a failure of the men and women in the field. They are the result of decisions made well above them.

As long as the jobs are there and the penalties for employers are weak, no amount of border rhetoric will change the math.

I spent 24 years in federal immigration enforcement and retired as deputy field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City, the largest field office in the country. I know what it takes to move removal numbers, and it is not rhetoric.

Removals are a pipeline: locating the person, arresting him, detaining him, getting a final order through an overwhelmed court system, and putting him on a plane. The pipeline moves only as fast as its narrowest point.

When an administration is serious, it widens every one of those points at once, through detention space, fugitive operations teams, cooperation from local jails, immigration judges, and flights.

When it is not serious, you see press releases instead.

Consider what happens after an arrest. Many people assume a deportation is nearly complete once an officer puts someone in handcuffs. In reality, the foreign government has to be notified, and it has to confirm the person's identity and issue a travel document. Some countries turn those documents around quickly, while others slow-walk them or refuse outright.

Every day of delay is a day in a detention bed that could hold someone else, and if the wait runs long enough, the person may have to be released back into the community. Even when the document arrives, the flight still has to be coordinated, whether that is a seat on a commercial flight with escorting officers or a spot on a charter that has to be filled and scheduled.

So where is the pressure against mass deportation coming from? Look at who benefits from enforcement that stops at the factory door. Agriculture, hospitality, construction, and meatpacking interests have lobbied openly for exemptions and slower worksite enforcement.

Each carve-out is defended as practical. Taken together, they amount to a policy of enforcing the law against individuals while protecting the employers who hired them.

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Worksite enforcement is the one measure that shows whether an administration means business, precisely because it is the one measure that impacts the political donor class. As long as the jobs are there and the penalties for employers are weak, no amount of border rhetoric will change the math.

We should also call things by their proper names. Issuing work-authorization workarounds, or declining to pursue people with final orders of removal, are just amnesty by other names. Every one of these moves is a message to the world that American immigration law is negotiable if you wait long enough.

The people most insulted by this message are the immigrants who did it the right way. Every fraudulent case that clears is a slot, a court date, or a benefit taken from someone who waited in line and told the truth.

Critics say mass removals would disrupt the labor market and raise prices. The answer to that concern is simple: An economy built on a permanent pool of workers without legal status, who cannot report abuse and undercut wages for citizens and legal residents alike, is not a model worth defending.

Regardless of how it is covered, a substantial share of Americans support mass deportation. The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll surveyed 1,725 registered voters from May 29 to 30, 2026, with a margin of error of ±2.4 points. It found that 80% support deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes, up five points from 75% in April. That includes 71% of Democrats, 90% of Republicans, and 79% of independents.

They are not asking for cruelty. They are asking for a system that works, one with no amnesty, no fraud, and no exemptions for the well-connected.

Here is what keeping the promise would look like: mandatory E-Verify for every employer, funding for detention capacity and fugitive operations that matches the stated goal, worksite enforcement without industry carve-outs, and immigration judges and attorneys to clear a backlog that currently stretches for years.

The president made a promise, and voters took him at his word. The officers in the field are ready to do the job. What is missing is the will to let them do it.

Inside Jack Smith’s Trump dragnet



Jack Smith, the Biden regime’s former special counsel, is back in the news with his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. The Oversight Project has uncovered new records that don’t focus on the settled question of why Smith used federal power to target political enemies, but instead on how he was able to do it.

Understanding the “how” is more important at this stage. We all know why the weaponization of the Biden years happened. It happened because they wanted to extinguish a political movement so that people from around the country could never truly shake up Washington, D.C., again.

For those who believe Smith’s investigation crossed the line from legitimate law enforcement into political targeting, that broader reach is the central issue.

We also know why it can happen again if Democrats take back power.

In Democrats’ minds, they have unfinished business. They regard Donald Trump and his supporters as too great a threat to stop short the next time. That makes it essential to understand how the weaponization of government happened, how it could happen again, and what reforms are needed now to prevent a repeat.

Instead, systemic reform has largely fallen by the wayside, replaced by political declarations that government weaponization has been solved once and for all.

With few signs of meaningful accountability, the need for concrete action is urgent.

January 6 gave Democrats the justification they needed to discard restraint and use the powers of federal law enforcement against their political opponents. That effort did not stop with President Trump. It extended to his supporters, especially those who challenged the conduct of the 2020 election or became prominent figures in the broader America First movement.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith in November 2022 to investigate Trump’s handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his actions surrounding January 6. Smith became the central figure in the federal effort to prosecute the former president.

Smith took over the FBI’s Arctic Frost investigation, a sweeping inquiry that gathered records involving Republican politicians, Trump allies, and organizations.

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The investigation grew out of an inspector general inquiry that was later folded into Arctic Frost. Smith has cited that earlier investigation in denying knowledge of actions taken before his involvement, including those associated with former FBI agent Timothy R. Thibault.

According to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Smith’s team issued hundreds of subpoenas involving more than 400 Republican individuals and organizations. It also obtained phone records connected to 20 current or former Republican members of Congress.

Newly released records provide more detail about how Smith’s office conducted the investigation.

The scale is worth considering. Investigators collected cellphone records, audio, video, and other digital data involving elected officials as well as private citizens engaged in political activity.

Understanding exactly what was collected, from whom, and under what authority is essential to judging whether the investigation stayed within legitimate law enforcement bounds.

Smith’s office then faced the tough task of sorting through a vast trove of information and building a case for trial.

The investigation also gave prosecutors an unusually detailed picture of Trump’s political network. If the argument is that this information could be used for purposes beyond prosecution, the piece should show that rather than assume it.

Venue mattered too. Washington, D.C., offered prosecutors a jury pool markedly less favorable to Trump than many other jurisdictions.

Through Freedom of Information Act litigation, the Oversight Project obtained 844 pages of records from Smith’s office.

Those documents show that in July 2023, just weeks before Trump was indicted over his actions surrounding January 6, Smith’s team said it was in “desperate need” of forensic video software from Axon, a major law enforcement vendor best known for Tasers and police body cameras.

Axon has since drawn attention as cities across the country consider the company’s expanding surveillance technology.

The urgency inside Smith’s office was enough to override normal purchasing procedures, despite initial objections from a member of his own staff.

On July 13, 2023, the office’s executive officer wrote that Smith “supports more strict requirements than DOJ’s standard policies.” Even so, she authorized the purchase “prior to creating the UFMS obligation” — before the expense had been entered into the Justice Department’s financial system — because “the purchase is urgent.”

The order was placed July 14. Axon shipped the software licenses the next day.

Eighteen days later, on August 1, Smith indicted Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and events surrounding January 6.

The records leave key questions unanswered.

The Justice Department withheld the purchase price. It also has not disclosed what video or audio Smith’s team needed to process so urgently. Given the timing, the material may have been related to the January 6 case, but the records do not establish that.

Axon’s proposal also included language allowing the government to share “de-identified segments of Agency Content with Axon to develop new products.”

The Justice Department released only an unsigned copy of the agreement. As a result, it remains unclear whether Smith’s office agreed to let a private vendor use investigative material in product development.

Smith’s investigation likely cost taxpayers more than $50 million, according to a Fox News analysis of Justice Department spending reports. How much of that money went to outside vendors such as Axon remains unclear. Some expenses may have been recorded through the Antitrust Division or U.S. attorneys' offices, making the full cost difficult to trace.

But we do know that when Smith needed help targeting President Trump, he called Axon in a rush, and the company was more than happy to answer. The grand jury indictment over January 6 that quickly followed appears to be a natural consequence of Smith finally being able to dig through the results of his dragnet.

Smith’s office was far less careful with its own records. When it moved its files at the start of the investigation, Justice Department e-discovery staff warned the transfer “will change the metadata on those files (create and modify dates).”

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The office replied, “The team has no issue with the changes to metadata.” Its records officer decided the team’s Microsoft Teams chats were “not necessary to be moved.” Phones and an iPad used by Smith’s lawyers were returned to other Justice Department offices, with nothing in the records showing their contents were preserved first.

In the end, Smith did not secure a conviction.

The classified documents case was dismissed after a federal judge ruled that Smith’s appointment was unlawful. The election case was narrowed by the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, then dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election and Justice Department policy barred continued prosecution of an incoming president.

Smith resigned 10 days before Trump returned to office.

For many Americans, the arguments and passions of that period have faded. For those who were investigated, subpoenaed, or otherwise drawn into the government’s scrutiny, they have not.

Smith remains one of the central figures associated with that period. His return to the news is a reminder that the powers of federal prosecution remain in place regardless of which party controls the executive branch.

The damage was not limited to the final disposition of the cases.

Years of litigation brought legal bills, damaging headlines, invasive discovery, and scrutiny of people beyond Trump himself. The investigation placed an entire political network under examination by the federal government.

Trump was the central defendant. But the investigation reached far beyond him, touching elected officials, activists, and others associated with the America First movement.

For those who believe the investigation crossed the line from legitimate law enforcement into political targeting, that broader reach is the central issue.

Understanding how Jack Smith almost pulled it off, and who he worked with, would go a long way toward understanding how lawfare works. The senators questioning Smith this week have a chance to start. Republicans would be wise to take the leads developed by the Oversight Project and get to the bottom of it.

The one loophole in Trump’s tariff policy



The Trump administration’s tariff policies have delivered a series of wins for the American people. Ford announced that it would be shifting more production of its Lincoln line from China to the United States. Sapporo, the beer brewer, recently said it would move brewing from Canada to south of the border.

The tariff agenda has been pursued using a wide array of tools. Many, including steel tariffs, have come by way of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act. Steel and aluminum tariffs of some sort date back to Trump’s first presidency. Former President Joe Biden kept them going, and upon returning to office, President Trump increased them to 50% in some cases.

The loophole is pushing America’s retailers toward cheaper, foreign-filled canned food.

These tariffs helped to support a domestic steel industry that had fallen on tough times and whose weakness had turned the Steel Belt to the Rust Belt.

The strategy is clear: make foreign production more expensive, particularly in countries that regularly cheat, like China, in order to encourage companies to reshore in the United States. This will result in more jobs, weaker adversaries, more government revenue, and a stronger economy.

There is only one problem: There’s a loophole in the steel tariffs. The tariffs include tinplate steel, a type of thinner steel used to hold canned foods. Practically all of the cans of soup, fruit, vegetables, and fish that Americans purchase are made with tinplate steel. Tariffing tinplate steel in itself is no problem, as it fits in with broader goals of the administration. But in the current tariff landscape, cans manufactured in America and filled with foods grown by American farmers face much higher levies than cans produced overseas and filled with foreign-sourced foods.

It’s these imported canned foods that increasingly show up on American grocery store shelves, outcompeting against foods made in America.

The resulting issues this creates are obvious. The loophole is pushing America’s retailers toward cheaper, foreign-filled canned food. However, foreign food, especially in places like China, can be far less healthy or safe, since food safety regulations in those countries are far less stringent than in the United States.

This loophole weakens the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. It also directly benefits foreign competitors over domestic producers, both in terms of the tinplate steel that goes into making canned goods and the food found within them. This tariff on tinplate also shifts production and jobs overseas, at a time when American farmers, food processors, and manufacturers are capable of supplying the same products domestically.

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Fortunately, the loophole can be easily corrected: Apply the same Section 232 treatment to the steel in imported finished food cans that applies to imported tinplate steel, using the authority President Trump has already granted to the secretary of commerce and the U.S. trade representative. It will align with the administration’s broader tariff goals and support domestic steel producers.

This fix should not be difficult. Steel producers and manufacturers want to make their products in the United States. U.S. Steel, which was just saved by the Trump administration, is reopening a tinplate steel mill in Gary, Indiana, next year. But as long as this loophole persists, other companies will have trouble following U.S. Steel’s lead. And Americans will continue, in an effort to save money, to be directed toward foreign-filled food cans.

If the administration wants companies to invest, reshore, and produce in America, it’s time to stop giving foreign-filled food cans the advantage. The steel tariff should follow the steel, whether it arrives as an empty can or inside a finished food product.

What Chris Hansen knows about sin that modern culture forgets



“You see how this looks, right?”

That question captures Chris Hansen’s method. He takes a man who believed he was meeting a child for sex and forces him to look at his own conduct from the outside.

We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves. That is how ‘I knew it was wrong’ can coexist with ‘I did it anyway.’

For more than two decades, Hansen’s predator stings — from NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” to later investigations — have offered a grim case study in self-deception. The men know the conduct is wrong. They choose it anyway. Then, when Hansen arrives with the transcripts, they scramble to preserve the belief that they are good men.

In other words, Chris Hansen has given us a case study in sin.

The basic scenario is familiar. An adult begins communicating online with someone he believes is underage. The age is made explicit. The conversation becomes sexual. A meeting is arranged. The man drives to the house.

Then Hansen walks into the room.

“Have a seat. What are you doing here?”

Almost nobody simply says, “I came here because I wanted to have sex with a child.”

Instead, the explanations begin.

“I just came to talk.” “I was lonely.” “I wanted to make sure she was OK.” “I knew this was probably a setup.” Sometimes the man insists he intended to warn the supposed child about the dangers of talking to strangers online.

Then Hansen produces the chat logs.

He reads an explicit message in that grave, almost bureaucratic voice and asks, “What did you mean by that?” Everyone knows what it means. The point is that the words are no longer private. Hansen has dragged the man’s rationalizations into the open and placed them next to the evidence.

Now the story changes. Simple denial will not work, so the explanation becomes biography. He was lonely. He was depressed. He had a hard day. The goal is no longer to deny the conduct but to move the audience’s sympathy toward the man who chose it.

Hansen keeps returning to the same question: Does any of that make it acceptable to send sexual messages to someone who told you she was 13?

The excuses collapse one by one.

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Perhaps he missed the message stating the child’s age. Hansen points to the exchange in which the decoy asked whether the age was a problem and the man said it was not.

Perhaps he never intended to do anything sexual. Hansen reads the acts the man described in his own messages.

Perhaps he changed his mind on the drive over. Then why did he keep driving? Why did he knock on the door? Why did he bring condoms?

If he knew it was wrong, why did he still show up?

At some point, the rational answers run out. What remains is the answer many of the men cannot bear to say plainly: I wanted to do this.

Instead, they reach for the self-image they are desperate to protect. “I’m not a predator.” “I’m a good person.” “I just made one stupid mistake.”

The deception is not merely directed at Hansen. Much of it appears to be directed inward.

They are trying to preserve a portrait of themselves that the evidence no longer supports. Dorian Gray had the decency to keep his portrait hidden in the attic. Hansen puts the chat log on the kitchen table.

This is where Hansen becomes an accidental moral philosopher. He keeps asking a question human beings are remarkably good at avoiding: Why did you do what you did if you knew it was wrong?

The answer is frequently, “I don’t know.”

Philosophers have a name for part of this problem: weakness of the will, or akrasia. A person judges one course of action to be better and chooses another anyway.

Christianity goes farther. Sin is not merely rule-breaking. It disorders desire and corrupts our understanding of ourselves. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful. Paul describes people as suppressing truths they do not want to face.

We do not merely lie to other people. We lie to ourselves.

That is how “I knew it was wrong” can coexist with “I did it anyway.” Fallen human beings do not merely fail to do the good they claim to know. They can learn to love what is evil while renaming it good. Milton gives Satan the line: “Evil, be thou my good.”

Some of the strangest Hansen encounters make the point even more sharply: The men recognize him.

They have watched the show. They know what happens. They have seen other men caught in precisely the same way. Yet they somehow never placed themselves in the same category.

Those guys were predators. I’m different.

Hansen sometimes asks whether they have children the same age as the decoy. Many do. What would they think if a grown man sent their child these messages? The moral judgment suddenly becomes easy — until Hansen turns it back on them.

That brings us to the problem with toxic empathy.

Compassion is a virtue. But compassion becomes morally destructive when it rearranges the categories of victim and perpetrator.

A man who drives to a house believing he is about to sexually exploit a child may indeed be lonely. He may have suffered. He may have psychological problems. Those facts can help explain him. They do not make him the victim of the encounter.

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The child he intended to exploit is the victim.

Our culture increasingly prefers therapeutic questions: What happened to him? Why is he hurting? How did society fail him? Those can be legitimate questions. They become toxic when they displace the more basic moral question: What did he choose to do to someone else?

Hansen’s great contribution is remarkably simple. He puts the evidence on the table and asks the person to account for it.

In an interview with me, Hansen said he learned something from Mike Wallace: Sometimes the most powerful question is simply, “Explain.”

That is why the format has a moral force larger than the television sting itself. Explanation is where excuses either become clearer or finally run out.

For more than 20 years, Hansen’s subjects have demonstrated something Christianity has taught for 2,000 years. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” Jeremiah admonishes, “and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

Hansen’s kitchen table is not a confessional. But it is a place where self-deception has a hard time surviving the evidence.