For years, Democrats won elections by portraying Republicans as cruel to transgender people. In 2016, North Carolina Republicans passed a law restricting bathroom use by biological sex, and the boycotts that followed cost the state $3.8 billion in lost business over a dozen years. PayPal scrapped a facility that would have added an estimated $2.66 billion to the state’s economy. The NBA moved its All-Star Game out of Charlotte. That November, Governor Pat McCrory became the first sitting North Carolina governor to lose reelection, “weighed down by a law he signed limiting LGBT rights,” according to AP. In April 2016, Trump said Caitlyn Jenner could use any bathroom she wanted at Trump Tower and advised North Carolina to “leave it the way it is.” When Trump tweeted in July 2017 that transgender people could not serve in the military, voters told pollsters, 68% to 27%, that they should be allowed to serve.

Republican criticisms of transgenderism didn’t work. In 2020, the American Principles Project spent $4 million on transgender-themed ads against Biden in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, all of which Biden carried. Republicans and allied groups spent at least $50 million on ads about transgender children across at least 25 states in 2022, and Democrats concluded the ads had flopped. Third Way noted that the Democratic governors of Kansas, Michigan and Maine had all beaten challengers who ran them, and wrote that “attacking transgender kids isn’t the political win some on the right seem to think it is.” The next year, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear vetoed a ban on transgender medicine for minors, faced Republican Daniel Cameron’s charge that he and his allies “believe kids should have access to sex change surgery and drugs,” and won reelection by five points.

This year, Republicans view transgenderism as such a winning issue for them that they’ve made it a centerpiece of their closing argument for the midterms.

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A year after Tyler Robinson allegedly killed Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, many Americans believe that he either did not do it or did not act alone. Candace Owens has implied that “Erika Kirk conspired with other Turning Point USA leaders and even foreign governments to have Charlie killed.” She suggested that Kirk was shot “from below the stage” and that “the assassin fled through tunnels.” She said, “Charlie Kirk was the first casualty of the War in Iran. Never forget what they did to him.” Robinson, she says, is “a total patsy” who was never on campus that day. Israel, with help from other governments and from Kirk’s own widow and staff, had Kirk killed, she suggests. Owens and others point to the fact that Robinson was not on investigators’ radar until he turned himself in 33 hours after the shot, FBI Director Kash Patel had posted that afternoon that “the subject” was “now in custody,” ATF examiners could neither identify nor exclude the recovered Mauser rifle as the source of the bullet fragments, no spent cartridge case was found on the roof, and the trigger carried DNA from at least four people.

But Robinson confessed repeatedly in writing and the physical evidence matches what he wrote. When his partner texted him, “you weren’t the one who did it right????” he replied, “I am, I’m sorry,” and then, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” He left a note under his keyboard, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it,” and told a Discord server of more than 20 friends, “It was me at UVU yesterday.” The reason Robinson wasn’t on investigators’ radar is that his family turned him in within a day of the FBI releasing his photo. Patel’s “subject in custody” was George Zinn, a 71-year-old who confessed falsely to help the shooter escape. Surveillance video played at the preliminary hearing shows Robinson crawling across the roof and jumping down after the shot. The police found the rifle in the woods wrapped in a towel that was 95% his DNA, and the ATF put the odds at a trillion to one that he was the main contributor of the DNA on the trigger. There was no casing on the roof because the Mauser rifle is a bolt-action that still held “one spent round and three unspent rounds” when police found it. An “inconclusive” fragment comparison appears in about 20% of casework because rifle bullets break apart, and the same ATF report matched the spent casing to the rifle. The claim that Robinson was never on campus was debunked when the hearing played video of him walking around it. Finally, at the September 1, 2026 hearing, his own lawyers offered no alternative theory of the murder and agreed there was a single shot and a single bullet.

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One of the great memes of the last decade comes from a 1994 episode of The Simpsons in which Principal Skinner asks, “Am I so out of touch?” and answers, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.” The context is that Bart had skipped school and Skinner tries to find him by first driving to the Museum and then a 4-H club, shocked that neither Bart nor any children were in them. That is when he asks whether he might be out of touch about where children like to go when ditching school and decides, after a fearful moment of introspection, that no, it’s the children who are wrong for not being in the museum or 4-H. The meme became shorthand for people who cling to beliefs after they have been falsified.

That meme has come to mind over the past few days as I watched establishment figures struggle to understand why people across the West are rejecting their policies and views. For the liberal establishment, voters across Europe are voting to close their borders not because migrants commit crimes, depress working-class wages, and strain welfare states but because Elon Musk uses his algorithm to make people angry, racist, and “far right.” People are still angry at Anthony Fauci not because he created the Covid pandemic and then demanded lockdowns whose effects are still being felt, but rather because they are anti-science and/or weak. And governments are not scrapping climate policy because climate scientists lied for decades about everything from rockslides in Nepal to hurricanes to polar bears, and demanded degrowth, but because people are greedy and selfish in their desire for things like air conditioning and automobiles.

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Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has courted the American president and boasted of the results. In October 2025, the two men signed a critical minerals framework at the White House. Albanese told reporters that “our historic critical minerals framework is going to see us break new ground together” and that “this means more jobs in Australia, it means more resilience for our economy.” He described the meeting as “as warm and friendly as you saw.”The framework commits the two governments to “a combined $3 billion towards an $8.5 billion future pipeline of priority critical minerals projects in Australia.”

But on Monday the Albanese government introduced draft legislation that would let the government impose sweeping censorship on American social media platforms, including X, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, and perhaps even on Americans, for practically any reason whatsoever, with the transparent intention of silencing rising public opposition to mass migration. One section lets the government censor “any other material or conduct” that the Communications Minister “is satisfied may cause serious harm.”

That could, in practice, be anything, including criticisms of mass migration and Muslim migrants following terrorist attacks, like the one last December when a father and son, inspired by the Islamic State, killed 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl, rabbis, and a Holocaust survivor, at Bondi Beach, a popular site for Jewish Australians, during an annual celebration of Chanukah by the Sea. Australians who complain that migrants bring terrorism could find themselves censored by social media platforms under orders from the government. A platform facing an up to A$109.2 million penalty has every incentive to suppress posts about protests that involved any unlawful act.

In July, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) presciently warned that the Bondi tragedy was being used by the government “as an excuse for internet censorship and surveillance.” Albanese has already said One Nation, a right-wing populist party in the mold of AfD and RN in Germany and France, would “peddle misinformation and disinformation.” When asked about whether the legislation would allow her to censor misinformation, Communications Minister Anika Wells said, “We can emphatically rule that out.” But the legislation would allow her to censor anything that “may cause serious harm.” Last year the Albanese government claimed anti-mass migration protesters were linked to neo-Nazis.

This could upset the Trump administration, which has made defending American social media platforms and free speech a high priority.

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Political parties that oppose mass migration are “far-right,” according to most of the mainstream news media. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that “the far-right Alternative for Germany was projected to win a strong victory in a regional election,” and characterized the party as “anti-migration and Russia-friendly.” Reuters called France’s presidential front-runner the “far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.” AP described Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as “the head of a far-right party” who “backs curbing migration and promoting traditional values.” Euronews labeled both her Brothers of Italy party and Matteo Salvini’s League as “far-right.” Others describe Reform UK as a “far-right political party” and call its head, Nigel Farage, “leader of the far-right, anti-immigration party Reform UK.”

The label implies that these parties are fascist, but by the standards of scholars who study fascism, they are not. Roger Griffin, who wrote in 2020 that members of the International Association of Comparative Fascist Studies had “broadly adopted” his definition of fascism as “a revolutionary form of ultranationalism,” said in the same interview that “none of the leaders of illiberal democracies are actually fascist,” and that the danger of parties like the Rassemblement National “is precisely that they are NOT fascist.” Tim Bale of Queen Mary University of London noted that the term “far right” is a “loaded, weaponised term” likely to “cause confusion and controversy in equal measure.” Even Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, who is hostile to rightwing populists, admitted in 2024 that “if a party pushes policies that liberals regard as unpleasant, reactionary or even racist but does that within the framework of democratic politics and the rule of law, the term ‘far right’ may no longer be appropriate.” And Rachman said Meloni “to date has looked like a relatively conventional conservative in power.”

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That firewall began to break down on Sunday, when the AfD won a historic victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. “For the first time it was possible for the AfD to gain power, to be the winner, not only the winner of an election, but maybe in the end to be part of the government,” Voss said.

In 2020, after a Free Democrat politician won the premiership of Thuringia with AfD and CDU votes, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the vote “unforgivable” and said the result “must be reversed.” The winner resigned within two days, and Germany’s Constitutional Court later ruled that Merkel’s demand had violated the AfD’s right to equal competition.

“The voters of the AfD have waited for this for a very long time,” Voss said, and the party “overperformed a little bit, like 1 or 2%.” The party received 43.8% of the vote, which is more than double the 20.8% it won in 2021. Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU received just 17.2%. The AfD also turned out roughly 170,000 people who had not voted last time, which was its largest single source of new support.

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Last December, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva struck a sweeping deal with President Donald Trump that included lifting sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. In the spring of 2024, David Ágape, Eli Vieira, and I published “Twitter Files - Brazil” that showed that Moraes had secretly and illegally demanded Twitter’s censorship of Lula’s political enemies. Shortly after, the owner of Twitter, now-X, Elon Musk, criticized Moraes and defied Moraes’s orders. Moraes responded by temporarily blocking X in Brazil in August 2024. X fought for months but ultimately paid $5.2 million in fines, banned 223 accounts, and promised to operate “within the boundaries of the law,” after Moraes froze Musk’s Starlink assets. The Prosecutor General opened up an investigation of Ágape, Vieira, and I, and Ágape and Vieira had to flee the country.

In July 2025, President Donald Trump imposed trade tariffs on Brazil and imposed sanctions on Moraes for censorship and for prosecuting former President Jair Bolsonaro. Trump later lifted the tariffs and sanctions on Moraes, reportedly out of concern for the impact on food prices, particularly beef. Lula later said at an event with Moraes that Trump had asked him whether lifting the financial sanctions on Moraes was good for him personally, and that Lula answered it was good for Brazilian democracy. Lula then turned to Moraes, who was standing next to him, and said, “Your victory, Alexandre, is the victory of Brazilian democracy.”

Today the evidence is overwhelming that Moraes’ victory was a defeat for Brazilian democracy. What Trump could not have known at the time was that Lula’s Federal Police held evidence that a banker jailed in a historically massive fraud had paid millions to Moraes’ wife and had spent his final free weeks texting a number attributed to Moraes himself, apparently about the justice’s protection of him from prosecution. The same people who censored Bolsonaro’s movement also used censorship to protect some of the most corrupt people in Brazil’s long history of corruption, starting with the Supreme Court justices.

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This article was updated at 11:50 am ET on September 4 after we received a second email from The Hollywood Reporter after our publishing deadline had passed.

Elon Musk may have used his Starlink satellites to steal the 2024 election for Donald Trump, according to a new Alex Gibney documentary seen by The Hollywood Reporter (THR). “Two revelations, or at least intimations, especially stand out,” writes Steven Zeitchik. The first is an allegation by “Musk ex and former conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, a central figure in the documentary,” who says Musk had a “degree of certainty” about the elections that “I had never seen before.” She says Musk told her, “I have ten thousand lasers in space.”

“So you think he was referring to Starlink?” asks Gibney, who has made a series of films about frauds including “Enron,” “Scientology,” and “The Inventor,” about Elizabeth Holmes’s start-up Theranos.

“I mean, I don’t know where else he has space lasers,” replies St. Clair.

According to Zeitchik, Gibney “hints he is taking it seriously when he then says in his patented voiceover, ‘What is Elon building, what are his goals, what are his actual motivations, and do we even know this man at all?’”

But election officials in North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania confirmed what most journalists and people in politics already knew, which is that voting equipment is not connected to the internet. “Our election equipment is 100% air-gapped,” said Georgia elections spokesman Mike Hassinger, who called the claims “absolutely conspiratorial nonsense.”

And fact-checkers hostile to Musk debunked the Starlink theory in November 2024. FactCheck.org quoted a Georgia official saying “No Georgia election tabulation is connected to the internet, ever, not by Starlink or anything else.” PolitiFact rated the theory “Pants on Fire.” Poynter traced the theory to Threads posts from despairing Democrats “amid a larger wave of election denial claims from liberals that mimic Republicans’ false claims about 2020 election fraud.”

And yet at no point in the over 5,000-word THR article does Zeitchik ever mention the fact-checks. Zeitchik did not respond to Public’s request for comment, though THR did, as we describe below.

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Climate policies saved the world from catastrophic warming, say leading climate scientists. On September 1, a consortium that produces analyses for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released new scenarios. They say the new worst-case scenario is just 3.3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 over pre-industrial temperatures. That’s down from 4.6 to 4.9 degrees of the last three generations of climate scenarios used by the IPCC.

“Our business-as-usual projection of 3C of warming – rather than 4 or 5C – is a testament to the progress in global decarbonization over the last few decades," wrote climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Justin Ritchie in December 2019, in a passage Hausfather, Glen Peters, and Piers Forster quoted approvingly this May.

Others agreed. Chris Smith, a modeler at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis who helped build the new scenarios, told Carbon Brief that “back in 2010, RCP8.5 wasn’t an implausible future, we’ve now made it an implausible future.” Gavin Schmidt, the longtime director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argued that scenarios shifted “in light of what we (as a society) are doing,” so that “we have already done things and so ‘business’ is no longer ‘usual.’” Robert Vautard, cochair of the IPCC working group on physical science, said the old high scenarios “assumed no climate policies,” while “there ARE now many climate policies in many countries, developed in particular with the Paris Agreement signed in 2016.”

But the high emissions scenarios were never plausible.

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Anthropogenic climate change caused a glacier to melt, triggering the flooding in Nepal, said scientists and journalists immediately following the disaster. “Climate change is heating up the Himalayas and supercharging the risk of disasters like the deadly flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet,” the New York Times reported on August 27 under the headline “Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods.” Explained the Times, “As humans warm the planet by burning fossil fuels, the Himalayas are losing their permafrost” and “the thawing permafrost is destabilizing the foundation underneath glaciers, raising the risks of precisely these kinds of landslides and glacial collapses.” It quoted Ashim Sattar of the Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar: “There’s a very straight link between climate change and these types of disasters.” Alton Byers of the University of Colorado told the Times, “Permafrost has been the cryospheric glue that’s held the rock and the ice and the glaciers together for millennia, and now we’re getting increasing evidence that it’s being weakened by warming trends.” Three days later the Times told readers that “one thing seems certain: The risk of such events is increasing.”

But new satellite imagery reveals that the bedrock beneath the glacier collapsed, bringing the glacier down on top of it. “You have this big bedrock failure that took part of the glacier with it,” said geomorphologist Dan Shugar. His colleague Kristen Cook described it as “a collapse of a large piece of bedrock that was sitting below the glacier. The ground underneath the glacier collapsed and took the glacier with it.” Another glaciologist, Jakob Steiner, agreed, explaining that “You basically had the lower part of a glacier tongue that sheared off because the rock below failed.” Cook told the New York Times that “The rock that the glacier was sitting on collapsed,” and yet the Times headline is “Landslide Along With Glacial Collapse Likely Set Off Nepal Flooding, Scientists Say,” which is misleading in that it was the landslide that brought down the glacier. “Essentially, a chunk of the mountainside collapsed,” Shugar told the Times.

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The basic story of the Lindsay Clancy case presented on social media is one about women’s mental health and inadequate postpartum care. Lindsay was suffering from postpartum psychosis and heard a commanding voice that told her to strangle her three children, Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months), in January 2023, many believe. She was haphazardly prescribed 13 different medications by psychiatrists, was rejected by a postpartum outpatient program, and was dismissed by suicide hotlines. In this narrative, Lindsay was “failed” by her husband, her doctors, and “the system.” Her supporters have raised over $1 million for her parents, and hundreds of women gathered outside the courthouse on August 20 to support her, wearing pink clothing displaying phrases like “She Needed Help” and “Justice for Lindsay.” Fans of her lawyer greeted and hugged him outside the courthouse yesterday, saying, “You’re the voice of so many moms.”

Yet Lindsay’s claims of psychiatric neglect and lack of care are fundamentally inaccurate. Lindsay had far more assistance than most women. She received 18 weeks of maternity leave with the option to extend it, and two of her children went to daycare. She had a competent nanny and help from her parents, and her husband, Patrick Clancy, worked from home. Lindsay’s psychiatrists and nurses were highly responsive to her requests and needs. The reason she had so many prescriptions was in part because she went to different doctors and did not stick to one plan. Lindsay voluntarily left an inpatient program and was not coldly “turned away” from postpartum mental health treatment, but was instead given other options for her generalized anxiety and depression. When Lindsay called the suicide hotline, she disclosed no specific plan to hurt herself or anyone else.

The jury in her trial today told the judge that they could not reach a verdict, and the judge asked them to continue deliberations. Since the jury was not sequestered, it is easy to imagine that both the news media and social media may have influenced the deadlock. On TikTok and Instagram, users have advanced the conspiracy theory that Patrick Clancy was the real killer.

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Many are blaming climate change for the flood in Nepal that killed at least 903 and up to 5,000. “A melting glacier contributed to the deadly Nepal floods,” headlined NPR. “We can expect more like this.” It quoted Twila Moon of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who said, “There’s no question that this event was made more likely because of climate change and that we’re seeing more likely other similar glacier hazards occurring.” NBC News reported that the collapse “was linked to climate change, scientists say.” Glaciologist Jakob Steiner told CBS, “What happened yesterday is unfortunately the new normal. It’s going to get worse from here onwards.”

But experts had specifically warned of this disaster for years, the same river had flooded a year earlier, and a cheap technical fix that wasn’t in place would have saved most lives. Sensors and sirens should have alerted people to evacuate and walk uphill and yet last week’s flood came with no alert at all — just like a disaster in 2025.

Proof of the efficacy of flood prevention comes from Bangladesh, which evacuated nearly one million people ahead of a 2022 cyclone with mobile alerts, loudspeakers and concrete shelters and lost fewer than 40 people, where a cyclone of similar size in 1970 had killed 300,000 to 500,000. Nepal could have done the same but didn’t.

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Yesterday, I described the now-overwhelming body of evidence that the Left, and not the Right, radicalized. Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found that the Left had grown over ten times more extreme than the Right on core issues from 1988 to 2024. That data is backed up by Gallup and Pew data showing a similarly dramatic asymmetric shift on the issues. I noted that the people who radicalized were the college-educated, with postgraduates swinging left after 2010, while every less-educated bloc in America drifted right.

And yet many and often most progressives cling to clearly false beliefs, including about their own radicalization. They believe conservatives radicalized and progressives didn’t. They believe Anthony Fauci is a hero of science despite overwhelming evidence that Fauci promoted destructive school closures and universal vaccination against the best scientific evidence. Progressives believe ICE is as bad as the Gestapo, or nearly so, a comparison that Democratic lawmakers made repeatedly. They believe police kill unarmed black men by the hundreds or thousands every year out of racial bias, even though the Harvard economist Roland Fryer first found no racial difference in police shootings a decade ago, and newer benchmarking against crime rates and a 2023 review of more recent data have come to the same conclusion. The Left still believes Trump and Republicans are fascists and came within hours of overthrowing the government on January 6. Progressives believe climate change threatens life on Earth. They support “gender affirming” surgeries on adolescents, even though a 2024 study of more than 90 million patient records found that adults who underwent such surgery attempted suicide at 12 times the rate of other emergency room patients and at nearly five times the rate of matched patients who had undergone tubal ligations or vasectomies.

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Since 2016, mainstream news media, university professors, and Democratic politicians have argued that Trump and the Republicans grew extreme and that their extremism drove America’s polarization. Ezra Klein, now a New York Times columnist, advanced this idea in his 2020 book, Why We’re Polarized, telling an interviewer, “If you’re talking about polarization, you have to talk about why the Republican Party has become a very different institution from the Democratic Party.” Asymmetric polarization, Klein said, “was a very big part of my story of American politics.” New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat declared in 2022: “The GOP is an authoritarian party now…It is a far-right party that has exited democracy,” she said. “It no longer has any interest in that.” That September, President Biden told an audience outside Independence Hall that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” And much of the mainstream news media over the last decade declared the Republicans a fascist party with Trump equivalent to Hitler.

But Republican voters never radicalized. In February, researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found the opposite of the conventional wisdom. “Right-leaning Americans have remained fairly stable in their positions for the last 35 years,” said senior author Lee de-Wit, who runs the lab, “and may feel left behind as half the country has shifted towards an ever more progressive outlook on many issues.” De-Wit and coauthors sorted Americans by their opinions on actual issues rather than by party or ideological identity. They analyzed more than 35,000 responses to the American National Election Studies from 1988 to 2024, covering 14 core issues from abortion to health insurance to racial discrimination. Pew’s own values surveys, running since 1994, point the same way on most cultural issues, showing Republicans holding flat or in some cases becoming more liberal. For example, between 1994 and 2017, the share of Republicans telling Pew that immigrants strengthen the country rose from 30% to 42%, a move toward the liberal position. Republican acceptance of homosexuality rose as well.

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News media organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom believe it is factually accurate and ethical to refer to people by the pronouns they prefer. The Associated Press Stylebook says that it recognizes “the need for a pronoun for people who don’t identify as a he or a she” and instructs journalists to use neither “biological sex” nor “both sexes,” since not everyone identifies with male or female. The BBC’s news style guide states that “We generally use the term and pronoun preferred by the person in question, unless there are editorial reasons not to do so.”

In fact, it is wrong for journalists to use inaccurate pronouns. Pronouns in English carry information about sex, and readers understand “she” to mean a female. A man who identifies as a woman remains male, because sex is encoded in our DNA and no amount of hormones or surgery can change that.

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But President Emmanuel Macron and the French left are increasing their attacks on free speech. “France is in danger,” said Lenoir, “and the future of democracy is at stake.” Their main target is CNews, the conservative cable channel owned by billionaire Vincent Bolloré, which the French left, given its success, likes to compare to France’s equivalent of Rupert Murdoch. Reporters Without Borders called the first CNews warning unprecedented — but then demanded more. “I know this isn’t unique to France,” she said over email, “but my country is starting to rank fairly high when it comes to trying to silence those who don’t think like those in power.”

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The FBI opened Midyear Exam, its investigation of Clinton’s private server, which held evidence of influence-peddling, in July 2015. One year later, then-Director James Comey closed it with a press conference, calling her “extremely careless” but recommending no charges; he did so without advising the Department of Justice, which was unusual and inappropriate.

Twenty-six days later, on July 31, 2016, the Bureau opened Crossfire Hurricane, a full counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Special Counsel John Durham concluded in 2023 that neither the FBI nor the intelligence community “appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

Finally, in December 2019, an FBI field office took possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive, and in October 2020, Twitter and Facebook suppressed the New York Post story about it after FBI warnings of a Russian “hack and leak.”

The news media covered each episode as its own drama with its own unique cast of characters, and framed each incident in such a way so that the very idea that the FBI was abusing its powers lay outside of the Overton window. The media covered the email server as much ado about nothing, at best, and Clinton’s recklessness, at worst. The media framed the Russia story as a case of Trump’s conflicts of interest, at best, and Putin’s direct control of him, at worst. And the laptop story was, at best, about Republican persecution of an innocent man and, at worst, about Hunter Biden’s reckless behavior.

In every case, the media framed FBI officials as, at best, dogged investigators and, at worst, overzealous. Outside of openly pro-Trump right-wing media, few journalists covered the stories as the FBI abusing their powers for partisan reasons.

But it is now clear that a single thread ran through all three investigations, and it was one of partisan FBI agents and officials abusing their power in ways as extreme as J. Edgar Hoover did in the 1960s.

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Ghent University rector Petra De Sutter told students and faculty at the opening of the 2025 academic year that universities must protect free inquiry and debate. “In times of increasing polarization, the university has a duty to foster adversarial debate,” he said last September. “At a time when an individual’s feelings about climate change or vaccination seem to carry as much weight as years of research, it is all the more urgent that young people learn how to ask critical questions,” he said. “Doubt means that we dare to question convictions…” He then said, “’Dogma is the enemy of progress.’ You might know it. It was Einstein who said this during his speech at the Sorbonne in 1929.”

Today, eleven months later, De Sutter has suspended the researcher who exposed the plagiarism of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who died last week in an apparent suicide. In a statement, De Sutter said, “the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

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But what Acemoglu is proposing is a direct violation of the First Amendment, which declares clearly that the government must not take any action that limits free speech. Demanding that social media companies manipulate their algorithms, which are simply the step-by-step instructions that social media companies use to deliver content users are interested in, is blatant censorship.

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Moderates say the party went woke on migration, race, and LGBT issues. A Democratic pollster called the party’s orthodoxy “noticeably out of step with what was electorally optimal or viable.” His firm found undecided voters broke for Trump 52 to 38, with five of their top eight stated reasons involving immigration.

Progressives say the party failed to deliver a populist economic message. A Sanders-aligned autopsy found that the Kamala Harris campaign courted suburban Republicans while ignoring working-class voters, and that strong populist economic messages outperformed democracy-threat messages among Pennsylvania blue-collar voters, 57% to 45%.

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