Nearly all the attention so far has gone to the two major parties. The GOP nominee, state attorney general Ken Paxton, defeated four-term incumbent senator John Cornyn in a primary runoff last month with nearly 64 percent of the vote. It was a blowout, but Paxton’s chances in the general election are far from certain. A recent poll showed his Democratic opponent, state representative James Talarico, ahead by 3 points. Another poll, conducted before the GOP runoff, showed a tie. At this rate, Paxton can’t afford to lose a single vote—and Ted Brown is likely to take a few thousand more than that.

Brown, 65, is a retired insurance claims adjuster, a small-government activist, and the Libertarian Party’s Texas nominee for the Senate. This isn’t his first rodeo. He also ran in 2024 and got 2.4 percent of the vote. It didn’t matter, because incumbent Ted Cruz was able to beat his Democratic challenger, Colin Allred, by more than 8 points. But now, in 2026, it’s possible that a similar showing by Brown could cost Republicans the election. And Brown doesn’t feel sorry about it.

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To the foreign soccer fans spread all over the country for the World Cup, it could appear there are two Americas celebrating the nation’s 250th anniversary—a sort of split-screen version of the republic.

One version of America celebrates the spectacle of Trump’s UFC battle, in which one fighter accused Michelle Obama of being a man. (French visitors, already aware that American podcaster Candace Owens is accusing their First Lady of something similar, could be forgiven for thinking such accusations are a regular part of American debates. In reality, it happens only rarely.)

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Americans should have realized this on August 29, 2022, when The Wall Street Journal reported that supplying Ukraine with 155-millimeter artillery shells was depleting U.S. stocks of the munition to “uncomfortably low” levels.

Then it turned out something similar was happening with other weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Sending 10,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine has cleared out roughly one-third of the total U.S. Javelin inventory, and will require multiple years of production to replace. It was the same story all down the munitions line—from guided multiple launch rocket systems and Hellfire missiles to ammunition plants in places like Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Kingsport, Tennessee, which needed $678 million to ramp up production after supplying Ukraine emptied the cupboard.

Suddenly, there was no way for the American public to ignore what experts, Congress, and the Pentagon had known for nearly a decade: Our nation’s defense industrial base was in serious turmoil. And in the years since, though the current administration has made efforts to revive our standing, we still have a long way to go.

It wasn’t always like this. During World War II, the U.S. created the greatest defense industrial base the world had ever seen: one that sustained our ability to compete with the Soviet Union through the Cold War.

That has all changed. And the war with Iran and other conflicts looming on the horizon show that we don’t have decades to get things right. Either we correct the problem quickly—within three or four years—or we will surrender our superpower status the way Britain did after World War II, or France after the Napoleonic Wars, and all without a single shot being fired by our leading antagonist: China.

History is informative here. During World War II, the defense industrial base was built because President Franklin Roosevelt gave General Motors (GM) president Bill Knudsen the go-ahead to set loose America’s manufacturing might. From a virtual standing start in 1940, Knudsen and his business colleagues managed to produce, by the end of 1942, more tanks, ships, planes, and guns than the entire Axis.

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From the far-left Democracy Now! and The Nation to Steve Bannon’s pro-MAGA War Room podcast to television networks CNN, MS NOW, and Al Jazeera, Parsi has said again and again that President Donald Trump faces a quagmire in Iran and that diplomatic accommodation with Tehran’s ayatollahs and generals is the only way out. Parsi’s writing in Quincy’s online magazine and his own newsletter on Substack also reports what he describes as threats to the U.S. from the Islamic Republic, often attributing them to “sources in the Iranian capital.”

“Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE,” he wrote in May, essentially warning the U.S. and Israel not to abandon the ceasefire that took effect in April by resuming attacks against Iran. “Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub.”

In the eyes of some inside the Trump administration, Parsi isn’t just another Washington pundit eager to share his point of view. The State Department has launched an investigation of Parsi and could try to deport him, according to U.S. officials and documents reviewed by The Free Press. Parsi was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden, has lived in the U.S. for over 25 years, and holds a green card.

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What happened next was, in Fifield’s words, “disgusting.”

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Isn’t that always the way with her? Industrious Jill Biden with her pastel knits, cheerleader enthusiasms, and endless grading of community college essays usually keeps a lid on things. Better to describe the table decorations at a White House Teacher Appreciation lunch in sadistic detail than let her hair down. She’s been a politician’s wife for almost half a century, and if her attention is no longer on the next campaign, it’s fixed on her husband’s legacy. Still, toward the end, the book provides a shimmer of what she thinks about the Democratic Party shanking her husband and the belief shared by many journalists that they were duped—by Jill Biden, among others—about the biggest story of the decade: President Biden’s obvious decline.

As we all remember, things happened very quickly after the June 2024 debate. The big revelation of the book is that when Jill saw Joe’s performance at the debate, she thought he was having a stroke. I didn’t experience it as catastrophic. I thought it was a representative example of how he regularly performed. At that point, fumbling answers, forgetting what he was talking about, and rallying with short-lived episodes of lucidity were regularly on display. Nothing was hidden from the public because you can’t hide that kind of thing. It had been clear long before the debate that he wasn’t fit for the biggest job in the world. He called the Ukrainians the Iranians, confused Angela Merkel with Helmut Kohl (dead since 2017), confused Emmanuel Macron with François Mitterrand (1996), and forgot the name of the prime minister of Australia and referred to him as “that fella down under.” He several times referred to Kamala Harris as “President Harris.” He said he’d campaigned in “54 states,” that “we have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean,” and that Nancy Pelosi had “helped rescue the economy in the Great Depression.”

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For hours, residents approached the microphone one by one, armed with simple questions. How would the data center affect their energy bills? How would this sprawling project impact land values and water usage?

The city council answered by gesturing toward the developer’s promises—and ultimately voted to approve the project. A few weeks later, voters provided their own answer. They threw out every single incumbent council member up for reelection.

As people debate the moral valence of artificial intelligence, many are asking the wrong questions. AI is not inherently a blessing or a curse; it is a tool that can be used for good or for ill. This means that whether the technology improves the lives of working people or not depends on the choices we make now.

We cannot afford to leave those choices to the venture capitalists and the engineers in Palo Alto. If we want to lead the world on technology while preserving our values—of individual dignity, of vocational work, of strong communities—we will listen to the people in Festus. We will listen to the people who feel like they are being handed the bill for Big Tech’s dystopian future.

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A criminal complaint was filed against the defendant, Guatemalan national Maritza Azucena Cahuec Coc, in an Ohio federal court last week for allegedly filing fraudulent unaccompanied alien children sponsorship applications to facilitate their entry into the U.S. An indictment is expected within the next two weeks, according to a source familiar with the matter.

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Hamawy, a plastic surgeon and retired Army doctor, won a crowded Democratic primary for New Jersey’s safely blue 12th congressional district this week and is widely expected to win the seat in November. Hamawy was never charged or convicted on terrorism charges. And prior to his plastic surgery career, he served more than 20 years as a medical doctor in the U.S. Army, where he worked overseas and provided medical care that saved now-senator Tammy Duckworth’s life.

But the anti-Israel candidate’s youthful association with the Blind Sheikh has drawn scrutiny from Republicans who are skeptical about his fitness for Congress while raising new questions about how far the Democratic Party’s tent stretches.

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Alarmed by Trump’s public flirtation with supporting a Florida abortion-rights ballot measure, Live Action founder Lila Rose traveled to the president’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club in September 2024 for a private intervention. During a sit-down that lasted more than two hours, Rose tried to persuade the president to adopt a stronger pro-life position on the campaign trail. She showed Trump videos narrated by former abortion doctors explaining how procedures are performed in graphic detail, hoping to convince him not to abandon a social-conservative movement that had stood by him for three presidential campaigns. But his response unsettled her.

“He expressed deep revulsion to late-term abortion,” she recalled in a wide-ranging interview with The Free Press. But she left the conversation feeling Trump’s understanding of the issue differed fundamentally from her own. “It seemed that his opposition was based on the disgusting aspects of abortion, which is not necessarily the reason that millions of Americans want to stop abortion,” she said. “They want to stop it because it ends human life, and he seemed to have this misunderstanding about why abortion was so deeply wrong.”

Even more concerning, in her view, was the sympathy Trump expressed for some first-trimester abortions, especially those that involve young women who aren’t ready to have children, are in college, or are at the start of their careers. According to Rose, he also suggested that he wouldn’t restrict access to mifepristone, the chemical abortion pill that has become the newest front in the abortion wars during Trump’s second term.

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But I hardly know anyone who is happy with how this has turned out, and if I do, they may be too busy inhaling pot to express their opinions to me.

A Pew Research Center survey in January showed that 55 percent of Americans support legal weed for medical and recreational use, but that’s down from a peak of 60 percent in 2021. I’m among that slice of people who have reconsidered whether legalizing would go well. Initially, I had the core libertarian intuition that consenting adults should be able to do with their own bodies as they wish. I have stayed at that point, but my intuition that this process would go smoothly has taken a real battering.

If you walk through major American cities such as New York or San Francisco, you (and your kid) may smell pot frequently. Yet it was never the intent of the law to have usage so plainly evident in public spaces. Instead, many of us were hoping for a libertarian paradise where everything would be tucked away at home, hidden from public view. That is not what we got, as it seems large numbers of people want to go around smoking marijuana.

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The day after scandal-plagued Texas attorney general Ken Paxton walloped incumbent GOP senator John Cornyn in last week’s Republican Senate primary, the Democratic National Committee posted a photo of their guy Talarico on X. The photo showed the Democratic Senate nominee wearing a shirt with a Texas flag while chowing down on some barbecue. The caption read: “November, here we come.”

The intended takeaway for voters: Sure, Talarico may be a progressive former middle-school teacher, a Presbyterian seminarian from Austin who calls women “neighbors with a uterus,” thinks “God is nonbinary” and, in 2022, pledged to run a “non-meat campaign.” But he’s really a brisket-eatin’, gun-totin’, football-lovin’ Texan just like you.

The DNC also posted two glam shots of the candidate. In one, he harked back to Beto O’Rourke’s famous 2019 Vanity Fair cover, his hands in both back pockets, smiling into the distance against the backdrop of a Texas flag. The other had him posing once again in a Texas flag shirt.

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Kyle served four tours in Iraq, including as a SEAL sniper in three of the most significant battles of the Iraq War: the Battle of Fallujah in 2004, the Battle of Ramadi in 2006, and the Battle of Route Gold (Baghdad and Sadr City) in 2008. He published a best-selling memoir, American Sniper, in 2012 which became a blockbuster movie of the same name in 2014. Chris was murdered in 2013 at the age of 38, by a troubled Marine veteran he was trying to help.

In the Battle of Ramadi in 2006, I was the platoon commander for Charlie Platoon, in SEAL Team 3’s Task Unit Bruiser. Chris was our lead sniper and point man. He was an outstanding SEAL, sniper, teammate, and friend.

Which is why it was so upsetting to those of us who fought alongside him when we learned that Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, had been claiming—falsely—that he witnessed Chris indiscriminately kill civilians during the Battle of Ramadi 20 years ago. But as painful as it has been for his comrades to listen to these accusations, it has surely been worse for his widow Taya and their children. “The truth is, it does hurt,” she told Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich, who asked whether it’s hard to hear this kind of commentary from someone seeking elected office.

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Yet those Republicans might be better served with a different line of attack, because there is little evidence voters care about Platner’s personal life. Story after story about his offensive tattoo, his racially insensitive social-media posts, and his riches-to-rags background have done little to dent his support. That’s likely because Platner’s flaws are familiar and forgivable to many of the middle- and working-class Mainers who make up most of the electorate. And many of the people attacking Platner are the same critics who complain about political correctness when it’s aimed at their own preferred candidates.

The drama over Platner’s background began in October, when a deleted Reddit account belonging to the Maine Senate candidate resurfaced. It revealed that, apart from being a progressive Democrat and a folksy oyster farmer, Platner was also a guy who’d once called himself a communist, used various slurs, complained that black people didn’t tip, and said rape victims should “take some responsibility,” among other things. Later that month, a video began circulating of Platner dancing shirtless and piss-drunk at a wedding, his Nazi totenkopf tattooed on his chest for all to see. Platner’s chief of staff bailed. Nobody wants to be on a sinking ship.

But as it turns out, the ship was fine. Democratic voters in Maine didn’t care about Platner’s Reddit account, the tattoo, or complaints that he was a rich kid LARPing as working class, since he presents himself as a humble veteran and oysterman, yet his parents are prominent professionals and he briefly attended an elite prep school. Platner continued to rise in the polls, so much so that in late April, Governor Janet Mills dropped out of Democratic primary, leaving Planter as the presumptive nominee. Republicans have recycled many of the same attacks Mills used against Platner, to no avail, hence his large lead over Collins. We can now say with certainty that the attacks on Platner’s character are simply not working on the median voter. Why?

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And as violent as it already was, things got worse a decade ago. The 2015 riots, in response to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in police custody, inaugurated a retreat in Baltimore policing and a multiyear surge in street violence. In 2020, amid a national increase in killings, the Charm City saw homicide rates about eight times higher than the national average.

Then, in late 2022, Baltimore’s fortunes turned. Starting sometime late in the calendar year, murder rates started plummeting. The city reported 333 murders that year. Last year, after three years of steady decline, there were just 133 murders in the whole city—a more than 60 percent drop. That’s the fewest murders Baltimore has seen since 1965.

“It was shootings every day, every night,” said Kin Brown-Lane, a lifelong resident of Cherry Hill, one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, about the situation prior to 2022. “People didn’t have their kids outside to play, because you just never knew what was going to jump off out here.”

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Republicans’ crusade against fraud has ramped up since YouTuber Nick Shirley’s videos alleging widespread abuse of federal funds in Minnesota’s Somali-run childcare centers went viral in December. Democrats are still figuring out how to coherently respond. Many appear to be torn between scrambling to solve the problem and condemning anyone who dares to point it out.

California has become the fiercest battleground in the war over fraud. On Tuesday, Democrats in the state assembly passed AB-2624, entitled “Privacy for immigration support services providers.” Republicans have a different name for the bill: the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” It was introduced by Democrats after the YouTuber followed up his Minnesota video with another one alleging over $170 million in fraud in the state’s publicly funded hospice and daycare centers. AB-2624 targets those who seek to emulate Shirley’s visits to purportedly fraudulent businesses by criminalizing certain disclosures of identifiable information for businesses and nonprofits that serve immigrants.

The bill resembles much of Democrats’ public response to Republicans’ accusations of tolerating fraud—deny, deflect, and act only under pressure. Yet for all the bluster, Democratic administrations in Minnesota, California, and Maine are quietly executing the very purges and investigations they once denounced as “racially charged” or “contrived.”

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When Senator Elizabeth Warren asked him how the Iran war was “America First,” Colby didn’t miss a beat. “I would say America First and peace-through-strength are served by rolling back, as the military campaign is designed to do, the threats posed by Iran’s very large and growing missile and one-way attack drone program, its navy, and of course, ensuring that it doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.”

For most senior Trump administration officials, testifying to the merits of the president’s war would be unremarkable. But Colby, known as Bridge to his friends, is a different story. The sandy-haired 46-year-old policy intellectual made his name in and out of government by warning about the perils of overstretched U.S. military commitments.

His job in the second Trump presidency as the under secretary of defense for policy seemed like a perfect match. Colby was serving a commander in chief who campaigned against the Middle Eastern wars of his predecessors. Yet the Iran war is a reminder that Trump’s worldview cannot be reduced to campaign slogans. For years, Colby has tried to persuade Washington to focus on the growing threat from China and shift away from Europe and the Middle East. And yet here he is, serving in an administration that has launched another war far away from America’s chief adversary.

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His recent actions suggest that he’d prefer to see Republicans fall than sacrifice a single one of his personal interests. Nowhere is that clearer than in Texas. Ken Paxton’s blowout victory in the state’s GOP Senate primary on Tuesday is the latest consequence of Trump’s my-way-or-the-highway approach to November. Just over a week before the primary election, the president sealed the result by endorsing the state’s attorney general over his opponent, sitting senator John Cornyn. Paxton said as much in his victory speech Tuesday. “President Trump is the leader of our party, and his endorsement is the most powerful force in politics.”

Trump preferred Paxton because he believes he’ll lend himself to the president’s plan to remake the Senate, along with election rules across the country. “Ken is a Strong Supporter of TERMINATING THE FILIBUSTER and, very importantly, THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Trump said on Truth Social last week. He wants allies in the Senate who will eliminate the barrier to simple majority rule and push through the SAVE America Act, which would impose strict voter ID and mail-voting rules on all 50 states.

Yet Trump won’t get either wish if Paxton loses his race in November, which the polls suggest is fairly likely. He trails Democratic nominee James Talarico by 1.5 percent in the Real Clear Politics poll average, and the largest poll, released in late April, showed Paxton down by 8 points.

That may be because he’s covered in more than a decade of serious scandals. Former members of his own staff claim he used his connections to the Trump Justice Department to help out a donor under federal investigation, to take one example. Cornyn’s record is clean, in contrast, and the final polling average showed him modestly but consistently outperforming Paxton in the general election.

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He pleaded guilty to two counts of assaulting, resisting, or impeding police and was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison. But now he wants up to $10 million from the Justice Department’s new Anti-Weaponization Fund, though he told me in an interview that he would be willing to settle for $3 million.

“I’m going to 100 percent apply,” Gieswein said, adding that he is “very good at business and bargaining.” He insisted that he is “100 percent” entitled to the money, “based on the law.”

Last week’s announcement of the $1.776 billion fund by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche didn’t include a word about those who were convicted for the Capitol riot. But about 1,500 of them received a pardon from President Donald Trump hours after he was sworn in for his second term. “These people have been destroyed,” he said.

Several January 6 rioters told me Trump’s words and actions—not to mention the document signed by Blanche containing vague details about how the money will be awarded—give them confidence they will benefit financially once the Anti-Weaponization Fund is up and running.

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“No,” the Democratic congressional candidate in Texas said in a defiant TikTok video last week. “I said I want to imprison the American billionaire Zionists.”

That clarification has done little to calm the firestorm around Galindo, a San Antonio sex therapist and one of the two candidates in Tuesday’s Democratic runoff for a newly drawn House seat. In an earlier post, Galindo said she wanted to turn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility into a “castration processing center for pedophiles,” which she suggested would include “most of the Zionists.” The comments drew bipartisan condemnation and sent national Democrats scrambling to stop her in the race’s final days.

But the scandal was not entirely a surprise to those who know Galindo. Candidates who have run against her, a businessman whose project was nearly derailed by Galindo, and a former San Antonio City Hall staffer who used to spar with her at public meetings describe her as “out there,” “conspiratorial,” and “very angry.” And for some, that’s not a bad thing.

“There’s an appetite for all these types of things, just like with Marjorie Taylor Greene,” said Ricardo Villarreal, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for a different House seat in Texas and one of Galindo’s only four donors, according to her Federal Election Commission filings. (Two of the other donors are her relatives.) “She’s definitely got her supporters,” Villarreal said.

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