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A Trump official at a recent hearing gave an answer that had nothing to do with the question asked, offering instead, “Biden…” A senator cut the official off immediately.

Trump counselor Peter Navarro , U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Agriculture Secretary Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently blamed Joe Biden for current high beef prices. Bessent also blamed Biden for Spirit Airlines’ collapse, even though Spirit blamed it on high gas prices due to Donald Trump’s war with Iran. And it goes on and on.

Welcome to 21st century America, which is experiencing a massive outbreak of political Tourette syndrome.

People who have Tourette syndrome have involuntary tics. In popular culture, Tourette syndrome was defined by a November 2002 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” where Larry David and several others open a new restaurant whose talented new chef’s tics are insults and uncontrollable swearing. On opening night the chef loudly swears and David, in an act of solidarity, swears to show customers it’s OK, it’s merely part of an unusual dining experience. So all the customers gleefully swear.

All of this started with Donald Trump. By blaming Biden constantly Trump has made it acceptable for administration officials and Republicans to immediately blame current ills on the former president.

There’s a long tradition of presidents criticizing their predecessors, but historically it’s been framed as disagreement over judgment, not an attempt to rewrite reality. No president has attacked his predecessor like Donald Trump.

The unwritten rule was politics could be sharp, even bruising, but tethered to this reality. What’s different now is the willingness to shift blame by challenging the facts themselves, turning what used to be arguments over policy into arguments over truth. Presidents could blast those who came before them. Donald Trump’s attacks are deeply personal and come with mind-boggling frequency.

A New York Times analysis found Trump mentioned Biden or his administration at least 316 times during the first 50 days of his second term, mostly to blame him for various issues. Reports indicate Trump has mentioned Biden on average more than six times a day since taking office in January 2025. In a single address to Congress in March 2025, Trump referenced Biden at least 16 times. During a cabinet meeting in December 2025, he mentioned Biden more than 30 times.

Meanwhile, no president has lied as much as Trump. According to a ` Washington Post data base, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four years in office. The count is ongoing for his second term, but it’s likely surpass his first term. A New York Times analysis found in the first 10 months of his second term, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Barack Obama did during his entire eight-year presidency.

Journalist Carl Bernstein said “Trump’s lies are not just frequent, they’re a defining characteristic of his presidency.” Trump critic George Conway said Trump lies “even when the truth would serve him better.”

They say George Washington couldn’t tell a lie. If Trump chopped down a cherry tree and someone asked him who chopped it down, he’d say Biden. And then insist the tree actually fell during the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, on the judicial front, Delaware Senator Chris Coons couldn’t get some Trump nominees to say Biden won the 2020 election. Coons asked John Marck, nominee for the U.S. District of Texas, about the 22nd amendment, which bars presidents from a third term. Marck declined to answer, describing it as a “hypothetical” and saying he’d need to “review’ the constitution’s wording” first. The other three judicial nominees also declined to answer.

So here we are – where even basic facts have become optional, and people in positions of authority can’t quite bring themselves to say what happened or what the rules are. Because once “Yeah, but Biden” becomes the standard reply, the standard itself quietly vanishes. And with it goes accountability.

Copyright 2026 Joe Gandelman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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I sympathize with former FBI director James Comey – up to a point. It’s detestable, if not laughable, that the MAGA regime has twice indicted the former FBI director just to sate Trump’s revenge fantasies.

Last week’s indictment – claiming he threatened Trump’s life because he posted a photo of seashells that spelled the numbers “86 47” – is further proof his Justice Department bootlickers are clueless as well as mendacious. Because, according to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment protects “political hyperbole” and “language in the political arena (that) is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact.”

It sucks Comey has to weather these nakedly political persecutions. Plus, those weren’t even his seashells! He came upon them while strolling a beach! At most, he’s guilty of thumbing impulsively on Instagram, as millions of us do each day. And since when is “86” an imminent deadly threat? It means toss out, throw out, get rid of… enough already. I’ve wasted too many keystrokes on this paragraph.

No critic of the MAGA regime deserves to be targeted with trumped-up charges, but the violin I play for Comey is exceedingly small. We should never forget what he did in 2016 at the dawn of our dystopia. He’s a big reason why we’re stuck with Trump in the first place. Comey, thanks to his foolish electoral intrusions, helped unleash the junkyard dog who treats the Constitution as a chew toy and who, with the avarice of a leech, is sucking the life’s blood out of our body politic.

I call it Comey’s original sin.

It can surely be argued that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 for many reasons – her inability to attract working-class whites, her misfortune to be a woman in a misogynistic culture, and many more. But it surely didn’t help to have the director of the FBI put his thumb on the scale with tin-eared ineptitude.

It all started in the summer of 2016, when the FBI determined Hillary’s use of a private email server was not criminal. Normally, that kind of finding would be announced in a single terse sentence. But Comey decided to break FBI tradition and make a long public pronouncement about how Hillary’s behavior, while fully within the law, had nevertheless been “extremely careless.” Voters who were skeptical about Hillary got two messages: (1) She’s too careless to be trusted, and (2) Since she wasn’t charged with a crime, she got away with something.

Comey subsequently tried to explain why he’d gone public: He wanted “to show transparency…It was the least worst way to close the investigation.” Wrong. It was his job to investigate and determine the worth of the investigation. As a general matter, when prosecutors and investigators decline to indict someone, they don’t go public to rebuke the person who was targeted. As the respected legal analyst Benjamin Wittes said that summer, “We want them to shut the heck up.”

But having established the precedent of not shutting up, Comey proceeded to double down on “transparency” 11 days before the election. His October 28 letter to Congress – publicly announcing that the Hillary probe was reopened, to examine some new emails found on a random laptop (emails that turned out to be nothing) – darkened the cloud over Hillary and sent out bad vibes to voters who’d not yet made up their minds. Comey later insisted he went public because he thought Hillary would win the election anyway, and he feared if she won while the reopened probe was being conducted in secret, that she’d be viewed as an illegitimate president.

But, again, it was not Comey’s job as FBI director to parse the polls and play politics. Stomping publicly on Hillary only 11 days before the election was not only a “misuse of prosecutorial power” (according to Larry Thompson, a former deputy attorney general under George W. Bush), and “an abuse of power” (according to ex-Bush legal adviser Richard Painter), Comey also violated a longstanding Justice Department rule that bars the FBI from publicly discussing probes within 60 days of an election.

Comey’s behavior dealt Hillary the fatal blow that helped Trump eke out his 2016 win by 80,000 votes in three key states, with late-deciding voters braking for Trump.

But here’s what really ticks me off. In the fall of 2016, as Americans prepared to vote, Comey did not announce his probe of Trump-Russia. It was “transparency” in the first case, but confidentiality in the second case.

And what a farce it was, shortly before Trump’s first inauguration, when Comey was summoned to a hearing on Capitol Hill. When he was queried about the status of the Trump-Russia investigation, he replied (I kid you not):

“I would never comment on investigations – whether we have one or not – in an open forum…We never confirm or deny a pending investigation.”

Which prompted independent Senator Angus King of Maine to craft this comeback: “The irony of your making that statement here, I cannot avoid.”

I trust Coney will survive the new show trial concocted by Trump’s corrupt DOJ. But we should never forget that if he hadn’t blundered so egregiously, the tyrant who torments us today might never have gained power.

–

Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com

Related Cartoons

The post James Comey’s original sin appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

First of all, we have lost the trust of the Iranian people. In December 2025 and earlyJanuary 2026, the Iranians by the millions demonstrated against the regime in the major cities. President Trump urged them to keep demonstrating declaring that help was on the way. However, the bombing of the Iranian leadership, the Revolutionary Guard and Basij encampments, facilities and buildings did not start until February 8, allowing the Iranian military forces to slaughter the demonstrators. It is estimated that 30-40,000 Iranians were killed by their own military.

We also lost the trust and aid from our allies in NATO. By launching our attacks on Iran without notifying our allies and gaining their consent, we lost any help we might have received from them. They could have been of value in opening the Strait of Hormuz. We also lost the trust of the Gulf states by being unable to protect them from Iranian missiles and drones.

And we lost free passage through the Strait of Hormuz which had not been a problem before the war. This has had a negative effect on the world’s economy and our economy. Opening up the Strait does not appear to be an easy task without restarting the war.

The war has also depleted the supply of our most important weapons including cruise missiles and Tomahawk missiles. Also Patriot interceptor missiles and ATACMS ground-based missiles. Our defense industry does not produce enough of these weapons to replace them quickly which leaves us short of both offensive and defensive weapons. It’s unclear how quickly these can be manufactured if the defense industry ramps up production.

Thus it appears that we’ve certainly lost more than we’ve gained in our short conflict with Iran. They still have their enriched uranium which we hoped to remove, and they’ve closed the Strait of Hormuz, strangling Western and Asian economies. Good move, Mr. President.
www.robertlevinebooks.com

The post What Have We Lost? appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

President Donald Trump sparked immediate outcry on April 12, 2026, when he posted an image of himself as a Jesus-like figure. The post, which Trump later said was supposed to depict him as a doctor, came shortly after the president criticized Pope Leo XIV as “weak” and “terrible.”

Three days later, Trump posted an image depicting Jesus with his left hand on the president’s shoulder. Referring to that post, Trump observed, “Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!”

These posts help illustrate the political messianism that Trump has brought to the Oval Office.

Political messianism is a style of leadership that places great faith in a single leader who is endowed with godlike attributes. It does not welcome dissent, and it portrays politics as a struggle between good and evil.

Eric Voegelin, a 20th-century political thinker, warned that political messianism often fuels authoritarian rule. It divides society, with a messianic leader’s supporters seeing him as a savior who will deliver their country into a golden age, while opponents foresee a coming apocalypse.

Democratic politics thrive when leaders and followers act with modesty and humility, when no one sees themselves as infallible or indispensable. As someone who teaches and writes about U.S. democracy, I don’t think it can thrive, or even survive, when its leaders see themselves as godlike and when the citizenry is divided into true believers and heretics.

Trump’s messianic vision

The image depicting Trump as a Jesus-like figure is the latest evidence of the president’s messiah complex.

At the Republican National Convention in 2016, he boasted that “I alone can fix it,” referring to a system that was responsible for what he would later call “American carnage.”

In a 2019 speech, Trump referred to himself as “the chosen one.”

In 2023, he described what he had done in his first term this way: “I think you would have a nuclear war if I weren’t elected.” As president, “I was very busy. I consider this the most important job in the world, saving millions of lives.”

And in a Jan. 8, 2026, interview with The New York Times, Trump said, “I don’t need international law,” since his actions as commander in chief were guided only by “my own morality. My own mind.”

The president is not alone in believing in his messiah status, or in comparing himself to Christ. On April 2, 2026, at a White House Easter celebration, Paula White-Cain, one of his spiritual advisers, used Jesus’ death and resurrection to explain what had happened to Trump.

“Jesus taught so many lessons through his death, burial, and resurrection,” she said. “He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President … you were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.”

Democracy and humility

In a democracy, it’s dangerous for leaders to see themselves as better than or morally superior to the people they serve. President Joe Biden captured that insight when, after he was elected, he recalled a family mantra instilled in him by his mother: “‘Joey, no one is better than you. Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you.’”

The political philosophy scholar Michael Sandel, whose book “The Tyranny of Merit” seeks to explain what happens to democracy when people, not just leaders, think that they are better than others, argues that such a view breeds “meritocratic hubris.” Such hubris has “a corrosive effect … on the social bonds that constitute our common life,” he writes.

“Humility is a civic virtue essential to this moment,” he adds. “It’s a necessary antidote to the meritocratic hubris that has driven us apart. It points … toward a less rancorous, more generous public life.”

Michael Walzer, another political theorist, explained the dangers of messianic politics this way: It “poses dangers to social order and national survival.” When it takes hold, he writes, “compromise is preempted by command; moral absolutism leaves no room – or all too little – for maneuver in times of crisis and emergency.”

Presidential fallibility

Even the greatest American presidents have not seen themselves as American saviors. They embraced at least some of the humility Sandel describes.

George Washington described the kind of person who would succeed him in office as just “a citizen,” not a savior or a person of extraordinary gifts. Their task, he thought, would not be grand. They would be chosen “to administer the executive government of the United States.”

Washington acknowledged that his judgment was “fallible” and that he’d made numerous errors during his time in office. “Whatever they may be,” he said, “I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend.”

He resisted the idea advanced by John Adams, who wanted the first U.S. chief executive to be called “His Elective Majesty,” “His Mightiness” and even “His Highness, the President of the United States of America and the Protector of their Liberties.” Washington turned down the pompous titles and accepted instead the simple title adopted by the House: “The President of the United States.”

Not a trace of a messiah complex in someone who could understandably have seen himself that way.

Or take Abraham Lincoln.

In his Gettysburg Address, considered one of the greatest speeches in American history, Lincoln did not toot his own horn or exaggerate the significance of his own words. Just the opposite.

As Rabbi Menachem Genack observes, Lincoln asserted during the dedication of the cemetery for fallen soldiers at Gettysburg that “’the world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.’ (T)hat phrase was not an expression of false modesty nor just a poor prediction of how that tribute would be recorded. It was a symbol of deep-seated humility.”

And in an 1860 letter to an admirer who wanted to inscribe a book to him during his first presidential campaign, Lincoln responded that “begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any respect.”

Almost 100 years later, President Harry Truman referred to himself as nothing more than an “old man who by accident became president of the United States.”

‘If men were angels’

Writing in 1788, Alexander Hamilton reminded Americans of a key maxim of life in a constitutional democracy. Government, he said, is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

“If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary,” Hamilton said. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Democracy is a mode of government built on the idea that none of us is infallible, including those who assume positions of leadership. Elections give the people the chance to change course and correct mistakes.

Presidential scholar Stephen Hess captured the essence of democratic leadership in a 2009 interview with Reuters. He said: “It’s more important to admit mistakes than to make them.”

In the end, as Walzer observes, there can be no messiahs in a democracy. The leader cannot “cast aside” the people. In a democracy, they must be “chastised, defended, argued with, educated” by those who lead.

Those “activities,” Walzer insists, “undercut and defeat” any pretense that it is only the leader who knows the way.

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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UPDATE:

Appearing before the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday and before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Hegseth defiantly defended the firings of more than a score of senior military and civilian leaders, including most recently Navy Secretary John Phelan and Chief of Staff of the Army General Randy George, below.

Hegseth faced sharp questions from Democratic (and some Republican) lawmakers, not just on the firings of but also on his reportedly blocking the promotion of four Army officers to one-star generals, two of them Black and two women.

On Wednesday, Representative Derek Tran, an Army veteran and California Democrat challenged Hegseth both on the dismissals and on the potential racial bias.

And on Thursday, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee “suggested the defense secretary had failed to recognize the accomplishments of women and people of color in the military.”

Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, told Hegseth, “You have the constitutional right to do these things, but it doesn’t make it right or wise…”

Representative Austin Scott, Republican of Georgia, said, “Secretary Hegseth, I respect you…I do want you to know I disagree with the firing of General George.”

Hegseth’s responses were vague and self-serving:

• “…the only metric is merit.”

• The firings are a bid to “change the culture of the department…”

• “Out of respect to these officers, I don’t discuss the nature of the removal.”

• Previous Pentagon leaders “were focused on social engineering, race and gender in ways that we think were unhealthy for the department.”

• “It’s very difficult to change the culture of a department that has been destroyed by the wrong perspective with the same officers that were there.”

The Secretary, however, minced no words when attacking lawmakers who disagree with him. “The biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans,” he said.

Original Post:

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth unceremoniously fired US Navy Secretary John Phelan as part of the ongoing radical shakeup of the US military organization. The firing takes place during a war in which US naval forces are playing a critical role around the Strait of Hormuz and in the entire region.

It is the latest firing, forced resignation, dismissal or “early retirement” of high ranking military officers and personnel since the Trump administration took office in 2025. It is preceded by the recent dismissal of Army Chief of Staff General Randy A. George on April 2, also at a time when the U.S, military is engaged in combat operations in the Middle East.

While Phelan has no previous military or defense experience (he is from the private investment and banking world and “a personal friend and neighbor [of Trump] who raised millions of dollars for his campaign”), General George is a warrior and a patriot with almost 40 years of meritorious military service that includes Operation Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation Enduring Freedom. Service for which he has been highly decorated.

More than two dozen generals and admirals, including military lawyers and even the head of the Army Chaplain Corps, have suffered a similar fate to that of General George since Pete Hegseth became Secretary of Defense.

When one adds up the years of invaluable military experience lost with the dismissal of just a dozen of these officers, one comes up with nearly 500 years.

Half a millennium of military experience squandered!

Why? Because of offering frank assessment and objective advice? Because of speaking truth to power? Because of being affiliated with DEI programs? Because of alleged “woke” ideology? Because of other ideological differences? Because of personality clashes? Or, worse, because of race or gender?

Lawmakers from both parties have voiced concern over the firings, worried that such dismissals will affect military morale and effectiveness. That such “could undermine trust in military leadership and lead to a culture of ‘yes men’ unwilling to provide honest advice to civilian leadership.”

Referring to the firing of General George, Georgia Republican Representative Austin Scott said, “If our top general officers are removed without justification from their positions for providing honest, objective advice – which is something I always knew Gen. George to do – then I fear it’s going to have a trickle-down effect. It’s going to be devastating.”

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posted on X, “It’s likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly…”

Addressing Hegseth’s plan to end the requirement that members of the military be vaccinated against the flu – more broadly “Pete Hegseth’s plan to corrupt our armed forces” – Paul Krugman uses the term “Cultifying the U.S. Military.” What does he mean by that? Krugman explains, “I mean creating an environment in which professional integrity, military discipline, and historical precedent are destroyed in service to the personality cult of Donald Trump and his enforcer, Pete Hegseth.”

Perhaps no one has expressed such concerns better than Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling who, after the firing and early retirement of Lt. Gen. Jeff Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin, respectively, wrote at The Bulwark “Donald Trump, Gen. Kruse, and the Perils of Yes Men.”

Writing that “[t]here are good reasons the best leaders don’t surround themselves with sycophants,” Gen. Hertling warns that “the peril of yes men is not that they flatter leaders—it’s that they betray them.”

Reflecting on the lessons of history, Hertling points out how “the opposite approach—surrounding oneself with flatterers—has often led to true strategic disaster” and how, for example, “Hitler’s coterie of sycophants echoed his delusions until his armies collapsed on the Eastern Front.”

Citing his own military career and the experiences of other great military leaders, Hertling writes:

Dissent is not a luxury; it is a strategic necessity. It is not disloyalty; it is the highest form of allegiance. Strategic leaders must cultivate a culture in which disagreement is possible without fear of reprisal. Because the surest way to endanger a mission, a military, or a nation is to demand silence when candor is needed most.

He emphasizes, “The measure of strong leadership is not how many people say ‘yes’ without conviction, but whether a leader creates the space for people to say ‘no’ with courage…When leaders protect dissent, they gain clarity. When they punish it, they guarantee blindness.”

Hertling concludes with the words, “Great leaders understand this. But perhaps no one understands it better than the soldiers who have lived through the consequences of plans made in echo chambers.”

Apparently the Commander in Chief and his Secretary of Defense do not understand.

The post The Frittering Away of Nearly Five Hundred Years of Invaluable Military Leadership and Experience (Updated) appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

Divided along ideological lines, the U.S. Supreme Court on April 29, 2026, issued a ruling that severely weakens a provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That provision, known as Section 2, prohibited any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for minority groups to exercise their political clout.

In her dissent on the ruling, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that it is the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

The decision in the case known as Louisiana v. Callais struck down a Louisiana voting district drawn to consolidate Black voters into a district where they would be the majority. The court’s conservative majority deemed the drawing of the district an unconstitutional gerrymander.

That, wrote Kagan, will “systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”

I’m a historian of racial formation and electoral and cultural politics in the U.S. I see this decision by the nation’s highest court as the latest in a long line of successful attempts, by both state and federal authorities, to limit the political power of Black Americans and, most recently, to reverse the gains they won in two periods of civil rights advancement.

Etching away at voting rights

Back in 2013, the Supreme Court tossed out a key provision of the Voting Rights Act regarding federal oversight of elections.

In the Louisiana v. Callais case, the court seemed ready to abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

While the conservative majority in Louisiana v. Callais did not explicitly strike down Section 2, the ruling appears likely to nonetheless open the floodgates for widespread vote dilution by allowing primarily Southern state legislatures to redraw political districts, weakening the voting power of racial minorities.

The case was brought by a group of Louisiana citizens who declared that the federal mandate under Section 2 to draw a second majority-Black district violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and thus served as an unconstitutional act of racial gerrymandering.

Initially designed to enshrine federal civil rights protections for freed people facing a battery of discriminatory “Black Codes” in the postbellum South, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause has been the foundation of the nation’s modern rights-based legal order, ensuring that all U.S. citizens are treated fairly and preventing the government from engaging in explicit discrimination.

The cornerstone of the nation’s “second founding,” the Reconstruction-era amendments to the Constitution, including the 14th Amendment, created the first cohort of Black elected officials.

As I highlight in my new book “Requiem for Reconstruction,” the struggle over the nation’s second founding not only highlights how generational political progress can be reversed but also provides a lens into the specific historical origins of racial gerrymandering in the United States.

Without understanding this history – and the forces that unraveled Reconstruction’s initial promise of greater racial justice – we cannot fully comprehend the roots of those forces that are reshaping our contemporary political landscape in a way that I believe subverts the true intentions of the Constitution.

The long history of gerrymandering

Political gerrymandering, or shaping political boundaries to benefit a particular party, has been considered constitutional since the nation’s 18th-century founding, but racial gerrymandering is a practice with roots in the post-Civil War era.

Expanding beyond the practice of redrawing district lines after each decennial census, late 19th-century Democratic state legislatures built on the earlier cartographic practice to create a litany of so-called Black districts across the postbellum South.

The nation’s first wave of racial gerrymandering emerged as a response to the political gains Southern Black voters made during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1870s. Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina and Louisiana all elected Black congressmen during that decade. During the 42nd Congress, which met from 1871 to 1873, South Carolina sent Black men to the House from three of its four districts.

Initially, the white Democrats who ruled the South responded to the rise of Black political power by crafting racist narratives that insinuated that the emergence of Black voters and Black officeholders was a corruption of the proper political order. These attacks often provided a larger cultural pretext for the campaigns of extralegal political violence that terrorized Black voters in the South, assassinated political leaders, and marred the integrity of several of the region’s major elections.

Election changes

Following these pogroms during the 1870s, southern legislatures began seeking legal remedies to make permanent the counterrevolution of “Redemption,” which sought to undo Reconstruction’s advancement of political equality. A generation before the Jim Crow legal order of segregation and discrimination was established, southern political leaders began to disfranchise Black voters through racial gerrymandering.

These newly created Black districts gained notoriety for their cartographic absurdity. In Mississippi, a shoestring-shaped district was created to snake and swerve alongside the state’s famous river. North Carolina created the “Black Second” to concentrate its African American voters to a single district. Alabama’s “Black Fourth” did similar work, leaving African American voters only one possible district in which they could affect the outcome in the state’s central Black Belt.

South Carolina’s “Black Seventh” was perhaps the most notorious of these acts of Reconstruction-era gerrymandering. The district “sliced through county lines and ducked around Charleston back alleys” – anticipating the current trend of sophisticated, computer-targeted political redistricting.

Possessing 30,000 more voters than the next largest congressional district in the state, South Carolina’s Seventh District radically transformed the state’s political landscape by making it impossible for its Black-majority to exercise any influence on national politics, except for the single racially gerrymandered district.

Although federal courts during the late 19th century remained painfully silent on the constitutionality of these antidemocratic measures, contemporary observers saw these redistricting efforts as more than a simple act of seeking partisan advantage.

“It was the high-water mark of political ingenuity coupled with rascality, and the merits of its appellation,” observed one Black congressman who represented South Carolina’s 7th District.

Racial gerrymandering in recent times

The political gains of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes called the “Second Reconstruction,” were made tangible by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The law revived the postbellum 15th Amendment, which prevented states from creating voting restrictions based on race. That amendment had been made a dead letter by Jim Crow state legislatures and an acquiescent Supreme Court.

In contrast to the post-Civil War struggle, the Second Reconstruction had the firm support of the federal courts. The Supreme Court affirmed the principal of “one person, one vote” in its 1962 Baker v. Carr and 1964 Reynolds v. Sims decisions – upending the Solid South’s landscape of political districts that had long been marked by sparsely populated Democratic districts controlled by rural elites.

The Voting Rights Act gave the federal government oversight over any changes in voting policy that might affect historically marginalized groups. Since passage of the 1965 law and its subsequent revisions, racial gerrymandering has largely served the purpose of creating districts that preserve and amplify the political representation of historically marginalized groups.

This generational work is being undone by the current Supreme Court with its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Feb 3, 2026.

Robert D. Bland, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Supreme Court ruling: The latest in history of diminishing minority voting rights appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

In a major ruling that would permit weakening the voting power of minorities in the United States, the Supreme Court on April 29, 2026, struck down a Black-majority district in Louisiana’s congressional map as “an unconstitutional gerrymander” and altered the court’s interpretation of the Voting Rights Act.

In a 6-3 decision, the court’s conservative majority argued that Louisiana had violated the law by drawing a second Black-majority district. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court was upholding a key part of the Voting Rights Act known as Section 2, which prohibits “voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified” in the act.

But the conservative justices also devised a new interpretation for its application based on historical developments. By doing that, the court majority made it more difficult for plaintiffs to challenge redistricting plans under the act.

In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan called the decision the “latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

Kagan, joined by the other two liberal justices, argued that the decision will make it effectively impossible to use race in redistricting – as has been done historically under the Voting Rights Act – and more difficult to prove discrimination under the act. She wrote, “The court’s decision will set back the foundational right Congress granted of racial equality in electoral opportunity.”

I’m a scholar of national political institutions, election law and democratic representation. The timing of the case carries major implications for the 2026 midterm elections. The decision, by weakening the Voting Rights Act, could make it easier for states to draw partisan gerrymanders of their congressional districts that reduce the power of minorities.

Long legal battle

The central question in the case was to what extent race can, or must, be used when congressional districts are redrawn.

Plaintiffs challenged whether the longstanding interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires protection of minority voting power in redistricting, violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that individuals should be treated the same by the law.

In short, the plaintiffs argued that the state of Louisiana’s use of race to make a second Black-majority district was forbidden by the U.S. Constitution. From my perspective as a scholar of U.S. federal courts and electoral systems, this case represent the collision of decades of Supreme Court decisions on race, redistricting and the Voting Rights Act.

To understand the stakes of the current case, it’s important to know what the Voting Rights Act does. Initially passed in 1965, the act helped end decades of racially discriminatory voting laws by providing federal enforcement of voting rights.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act forbids discrimination by states in relation to voting rights and has been used for decades to challenge redistricting plans.

Callais had its roots in the redistricting of Louisiana’s congressional districts following the 2020 Census. States are required to redraw districts each decade based on new population data. Louisiana lawmakers redrew the state’s six congressional districts without major changes in 2022.

Soon after the state redistricted, a group of Black voters challenged the map in federal court as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs argued that the new map was discriminatory because the voting power of Black citizens in the state was being illegally diluted. The state’s population was 31% Black, but only one of the six districts featured a majority-Black population.

Federal courts in 2022 sided with the plaintiffs’ claim that the plan did violate the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state legislature to redraw the congressional plan with a second Black-majority district.

The judges relied on an interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act from a 1986 Supreme Court decision in the case known as Thornburg v. Gingles. Under this interpretation, Section 2’s nondiscrimination requirement means that congressional districts must be drawn in a way that allows large, politically cohesive and compact racial minorities to be able to elect representatives of their choice.

In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a similar racial gerrymandering case in Alabama.

Louisiana lawmakers redraw districts

Following the court order, the Louisiana state legislature passed Senate Bill 8 in January 2024, redrawing the congressional map and creating two districts where Black voters composed a substantial portion of the electorate in compliance with the Gingles ruling. This map was used in the 2024 congressional election and both Black-majority districts elected Democrats, while the other four districts elected Republicans.

These new congressional districts from Senate Bill 8 were challenged by a group of white voters in 2024 in a set of cases that became Louisiana v. Callais.

The plaintiffs argued that the Louisiana legislature’s drawing of districts based on race in Senate Bill 8 was in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, which requires equal treatment of individuals by the government, and the 15th Amendment, which forbids denying the right to vote based on race.

Essentially, the plaintiffs claimed that the courts’ interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional and that the use of race to create a majority-minority district is itself discriminatory. Similar arguments about the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause were also the basis of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

In 2024, a three-judge district court sided with the white plaintiffs in Louisiana v. Callais, with a 2-1 decision. The Black plaintiffs from the original case and the state of Louisiana appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The court originally heard the case at the end of the 2024-2025 term before ordering the case reargued for 2025-2026.

Major implications

The court’s opinion reinterprets key precedent on the Voting Rights Act and the application of Section 2 to redistricting. It carries major consequences for the federal courts, gerrymandering and the voting rights of individuals.

For 39 years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has required redistricting institutions to consider racial and ethnic minority representation when devising congressional districts. Majority-minority districting is required when a state has large, compact and cohesive minority communities. Historically, some states have redistricted minority communities in ways that dilute their voting power, such as “cracking” a community into multiple districts where they compose a small percentage of the electorate.

Section 2 also provided voters and residents with a legal tool that has been used to challenge districts as discriminatory. Many voters and groups have used Section 2 successfully to challenge redistricting plans.

Section 2 has been the main legal tool for challenging racial discrimination in redistricting for the past decade. In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively ended the other major component of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, which required certain states to have changes to their elections laws approved by the federal government, including redistricting.

In this case the court did not fully overrule the previous interpretation of Section 2, but it has altered its application. The effect is that it limits the legality of using race in redistricting and the most common way to challenge discriminatory redistricting.

Additionally, because of the strong relationship between many minority communities and the Democratic party, the court’s decision has major implications for partisan control of the House of Representatives.

By changing the interpretation of Section 2, Republicans could use the ruling to redraw congressional districts across the country to benefit their party. Politico reported that Democrats could lose as many as 19 House seats if the Supreme Court sided with the lower court.

This case builds directly on a recent case also authored by Alito. In 2024, the court overruled a lower court’s finding of racial vote dilution in South Carolina.

This is an updated version of a story that originally published on Oct. 13, 2025.

Sam D. Hayes, Assistant professor of politics and policy, Simmons University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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After the shooting at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, which later led to a suspect being charged with trying to assassinate Donald Trump, far-right media entrepreneur and political influencer Tucker Carlson asked if it was “another staged incident.”

It was indicative of Carlson’s recent repudiation of Trump, where he apologized for ever asking people to vote for him.

What makes Carlson’s break with Trump notable is that he’s far from alone.

A widening slice of MAGA’s media ecosystem – once Trump’s loudest echo chamber—is now openly rebelling. Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly have all publicly blasted Trump, mainly over his Iran war rhetoric and what they see as a betrayal of “America First” isolationism.

They’ve called Trump “mad,” “irresponsible,” and urged the use of the 25th amendment. Nick Fuentes, who doesn’t go to many bar mitzvahs, has declared MAGA “dead.” The result: a kind of MAGA intra-civil war that would have been unthinkable just a year ago,

But this is merely Carlson’s latest shift.

I’ve been following Carlson since the beginning of his career when he was a mainstream conservative writer – when I then liked him.

Carlson’s father was the prominent San Diegan Richard “Dick” Carlson, an award winning investigative journalist, broadcaster, diplomat, and media executive. He had been a KABC reporter, Voice of America director, ambassador to the Seychelles, and CEO of the hated-by-MAGA Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Long before he became an intentional lightning rod, Tucker Carlson was seen as a sharp, often contrarian conservative writer. He wrote pieces for The Weekly Standard and National Review with a tone that mixed skepticism and wit more than bombast. He wrote for mainstream publications such as Readers Digest, New York Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal. Politico’s John F. Harris said Carlson was “viewed … as an important voice of the intelligentsia.”

Carlson’s move into TV on “Crossfire” on CNN made him a recognizable pundit, still within the bounds of mainstream conservative debate. After stints at MSNBC and launching the short-lived but influential The Daily Caller, his trajectory shifted more sharply when he joined Fox News, where his prime-time show had a more populist, nationalist voice that increasingly blurred into grievance-drive and conspiratorial territory.

Carlson’s rhetoric grew more strident and polarizing in the Trump era, moving from establishment-adjacent conservatism to a style that critics argue embraces cultural alarmism and flirts with fringe narratives. It culminated in his post-Fox reinvention as an independent media figure untethered from traditional editorial constraints.

Carlson has been called an antisemite, which he denies. But he certainly fits the bill.

Daily Wire Editor Ben Shapiro blasted Carlson for “normalizing Nazism” and for being “the most virulent super-spreader of vile ideas in America.” The Republican Jewish Coalitions’ Matt Brooks said when it comes to Tucker Carlson, it “may start with claims of patriotism, but it always seems to end with antisemitism.” The watchdog group StopAntisemitism named Carlson their “Anti-Semite of the Year” in 2025.

Carlson has curiously blasted the orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement for strongly backing the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, suggesting massive Chabad influence. I am quite familiar with many Chabad houses run by wonderful families, and they are o-r-t-h-o-d-o-x.

So, are Chabad adherents actually siding with Israel against one of its biggest enemies whose leaders have called it a “cancerous tumor” and a “stinking corpse” that must be “wiped off the map”? As kids say: no duh!

Comedian Talia Reese recently parodied Carlson’s comments on Jewish organizations and Israel, calling him “Tuccus [Yiddish for buttocks] Carlson” and suggesting he would next target the Chabad-run children’s summer camp, “Camp Gan Israel.”

So has Carlson changed?

Maybe this isn’t conviction so much as calibration — less a break with Trump than a weather report. If the winds are shifting, he’s already leaning. And if there’s a post-Trump stage forming, Carlson isn’t leaving it— he’s checking the lighting, and maybe the mirror.

Copyright 2026 Joe Gandelman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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When a couple marry in a church, synagogue or mosque, the ceremony does more than sanctify a union. Often, it binds two families to an institution.

For centuries, marriage and child-rearing have been among the main ways adults are integrated into congregational life. Couples who share the same faith tend to be more observant, and they often raise children within that tradition – bringing the next generation into congregational life. More marriages mean more families in pews and more children raised in the faith.

That helps explain why the rise of single adults is so unsettling for many faith communities today. In the United States, 42% of adults were not married or living with a partner in 2023, up from 38% in 2000. This shift is unlikely to change soon: A quarter of 40-year-olds have never been married, and a third of Gen Z are projected to never marry.

At the same time, the share of unmarried Americans who belong to a religious congregation has fallen well below that of married Americans. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 68% of married adults identify as Christian, compared with about 51% of never-married adults. Twenty-four percent of married Americans are religiously unaffiliated, compared with 39% of Americans who never married.

As a behavioral economist and a business school professor, I study what I call the “solo economy”: how the rise of single adults is reshaping workplaces, taxes and consumer markets. Religious institutions are the latest domain to face the same shift. They are not simply confronting lower marriage rates. Many of them, I contend, are reckoning with the consequences of treating unmarried adults as incomplete members of the community.

Alarm across faiths

According to the Survey Center on American Life, the gap in religious membership between married and unmarried Americans has widened substantially since the 1990s.

At the time, 71% of married Americans said they belonged to a religious congregation, compared with 64% of unmarried Americans. In 2019, those numbers were 59% and 45%, respectively. Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling firm, found that just 1 in 4 single mothers attend church weekly – the lowest rate of any parent group.

Communities that have historically built their infrastructure around married families are feeling the shift most acutely: couples retreats, small groups organized by life stage, children’s programs, and leadership roles that quietly assume a spouse. The cumulative effect is less about overt exclusion than about whom the institution imagines when it pictures itself.

In an April 2021 address during a churchwide conference, M. Russell Ballard, then one of the top leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, acknowledged that more than half of adult church members were widowed, divorced or not yet married – and that some “wonder about their opportunities and place in God’s plan and in the Church.” In July 2024, the church expanded its “young single adult” category from ages 18–30 to 18–35.

In evangelical Christianity, sociologist Katie Gaddini’s research for her book “The Struggle to Stay” found that women – especially those over age 35 – often felt overlooked, excluded from leadership and valued less because they had not married.

At a women’s conference in London, one attendee captured the tension: “I’m so tired of fighting Christian church leaders to be treated equally, but I don’t want to leave the church. So, what do I do?”

In Modern Orthodox Judaism, similar patterns of exclusion have emerged. A 2022 Nishma Research survey found that singles reported the lowest sense of community connection of any group studied: 69 on a 100-point scale, compared with 81 for married members. Another 2022 report, by Brandeis University sociologist Sylvia Barack Fishman, described unmarried members feeling “ignored and invisible” in synagogue life, sometimes treated as if they were broken people waiting to be fixed.

On my podcast, sociologist Ari Engelberg, author of “Singlehood and Religion,” described how unmarried adults in Israel’s Religious Zionist community internalize their single status as a religious failing. The community treats marriage as so central to observant life that remaining single can feel like falling short.

Doubling down

Religious institutions’ responses to the rise of singles have split in two directions.

Some have reasserted marriage as the expected path to adulthood, belonging and spiritual maturity. Pope Francis, for example, repeatedly warned about declining birth rates, calling the trend a “tragedy” in a 2021 address. In a 2023 worldwide broadcast, Dallin H. Oaks, who is now the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, urged single adults to date more, marry earlier and not delay having children. And in June 2025, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution lamenting “willful childlessness” and calling for laws that “incentivize family formation.”

In qualitative research with single churchgoers, a consistent theme emerges: Marriage comes up regularly in sermons – in illustrations, examples and applications – while singleness almost never does.

That instinct is understandable. But a strategy built for a society where most adults married young is a poor fit for one where many never will.

But doubling down carries a real cost. When single adults hear, again and again, that the fullest version of faithful life is married life, many do not feel called upward. They feel pushed outward.

Adapting

Other religious communities are adapting.

In the U.K., the Single Friendly Church Network developed a guided audit to help congregations across denominations assess how welcoming they are to people who come alone. In the U.S., ministries such as Table for One have tried to move singles programming away from matchmaking and toward spiritual community. And Fishman’s 2022 report on Modern Orthodox Judaism urged synagogues to give singles leadership roles, committee seats and ritual honors, regardless of marital status — though whether those recommendations have taken hold remains an open question.

But adaptation raises its own question. Are these efforts designed to support single adults as full members of the community or to manage them toward marriage? There is a difference between welcoming singles and treating singlehood as a problem to solve.

I see several practical steps for religious institutions that want to keep unmarried adults engaged in their communities:

1. Count who is actually in the pews. Leaders may not realize how many of their members are single, divorced or widowed. The Single Friendly Church Network found that when congregations conducted demographic audits, many were surprised by the results.

2. Give singles real authority. Inclusion does not mean creating a special ministry and leaving decision-making to married people. It means leadership, voice and visibility.

3. Rethink the language of belonging. Sermons and announcements that reflexively address “families” and “couples” can make unmarried adults feel peripheral. Small linguistic changes can signal that they are not.

4. Build community rather than dating pools. The goal should not be to funnel unmarried adults toward coupledom. It should be to treat them as complete people whose spiritual lives matter now.

Religious institutions have joined employers, policymakers and consumer brands in facing the same choice: Adapt to a society with more single adults, or keep building for a world that no longer exists.

Peter McGraw, Professor of Marketing and Psychology, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Maybe Elon Musk will give as another quarter billion. Or the Mellon family. Or Miriam Adelson. We can always depend on our donors to get us out of a hole. And we’re in a big one now. Trump dug it himself. The Iran War. Inflation! Lack of affordability! All those election promises disregarded. He thought he could do anything he wanted. Screw the electorate. He believed all those MAGA voters would back him and the GOP anyway. And he figured they had a few tricks up their sleeves. They’d find a way to win. The House and Senate would go Republican again, no matter what he did or said. He thought, we’re making America great again while I make me and my family rich. The people won’t know or won’t care. America First (or at least second). But if the House and Senate go Democratic in the midterms, he could get impeached again.

Of course, so far, the SAVE Act hasn’t gotten through Congress. This was legislation to restrict voters. Citizen identification that not everyone had. Particularly minority voters who tend to back Democrats. The more voters we excluded, the better it would be for the GOP. If we can’t get it by federal legislation, we can do it through individual states we control. Make it more difficult for people to vote. Cut the hours. Cut the days. Cut out mail in voting. Our MAGA voters will always get to the polls no matter what.

And individual states can gerrymander. So what if there’s not a new census. We can do what we want in the states we control. We’ve gotten about ten to twelve new districts in Texas, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina that should vote for Republicans in the mid-term elections. Maybe more. And now De Santis is pushing to change the Congressional districts in Florida to favor Republicans. That can give us another four GOP Representatives. Of course, the Democrats are also pushing changes to districts in the states they control, but they won’t be able to match us.

And we will place ICE agents at all the polling places to scare minority voters away. But if things continue to look bad for us, we can declare a national emergency and martial law, canceling the elections. If we did that at the last minute, the Supreme Court wouldn’t have time to reverse a Presidential order. We would rather not resort to that because it might look bad, but you never know what might come into Trump’s head. His own sense of morality tells him what to do, and he knows he’s always right. And the Court has already given him immunity for his actions as President. But he could still get impeached if the Democrats win both Houses of Congress.

www.robertlevinebooks.com

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Donald Trump’s retribution tour continues. The Justice Department announced that it will be prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey for a photo of seashells that it claims threatened Trump.

Former FBI Director James Comey was indicted Tuesday over a photo of seashells officials said threatened President Donald Trump, marking the administration’s second attempt to prosecute one of his biggest political opponents, three sources first told CNN.

The charges, approved by a grand jury in the Eastern District of North Carolina where Comey allegedly took the photo, include making a threat against the president and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce, according to court documents.

Comey responded to the indictment Tuesday in a video posted to his Substack account.

“I’m still innocent. I’m still not afraid,” Comey said. “And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary, so let’s go.”

The new case represents a reinvigorated effort to satisfy Trump’s demands to investigate his own foes, including Comey, who he sees as a key leader in the perceived effort to “weaponize” the justice system against him.

It also comes less than a month after the president dismissed Attorney General Pam Bondi. Trump had for weeks complained that Bondi was not aggressive enough in executing his agenda.

Todd Blanche, Bondi’s top deputy and a former Trump personal attorney, is now in charge of steering the department, and has moved quickly to act on matters that the president has publicly pushed for.

“While this case is unique, and this indictment stands out because of the name of the defendant, his alleged conduct is the same kind of conduct that we will never tolerate and that we will always investigate” Blanche said at a press conference Tuesday.

Tuesday’s indictment is centered on a picture Comey posted on social media last May, of shells on a beach writing out the numbers “86 47.” He wrote in the caption, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”

Almost immediately following his post, Republicans and administration officials went full bore in their criticism of Comey for what they said amounted to a death threat.

When used as slang, the number 86 can refer to getting rid of or tossing something out. Trump is currently the 47th president.

Most legal experts and social media commentators say the case is unlikely to go anywhere.

The Popehat Reports’ Ken White calls the case a grave embarrassment and to the United States Department of Justice and the rule of law. Some excerpts from his must-read-in-full post:

No minimally rationally person could possibly conclude, seeing James Comey’s beachside dad joke, that he was expressing a sincere intent to harm the President. Nobody could look at it and conclude that Comey intended to convey that message. In evaluating whether a threat is “true,” the trier of fact must consider the context. Here the context is seashells. The context is the former Director of the FBI, a lifetime member of law enforcement, who is a well-known critic of the President and a target of the President’s wrath, using a campy mechanism to express opposition to the President, using slang for “ditch” or “eject” or “get rid of.” No rational person could see that and say “the former director of the FBI is saying he’s going to kill the President”!”

I could now cite to you a legion of cases for that proposition, finding rhetoric far more concerning than this protected by the First Amendment, analyzing language and context to show this is protected. But it wouldn’t matter, would it? If you are a minimally rational person, you don’t need to see the precedent, and if you’re a cultist, no amount of precedent matters to you.

As a lawyer commenting on the Trump administration’s legal arguments, I face a challenge: how do I convey to non-lawyers, or even lawyers in different fields, the shameless fatuity of some of the Trump Justice Department’s arguments? Words fail. This case is overtly, obviously, on its face, ridiculous and premised on a foolish and unconstitutional theory. I know it as confidently that those of you who work with numbers know that 2 + 2 = 5 is not a plausible argument. I know it as confidently that those of you in the arts know that “John Wayne Gacy is the most respected American painter” is wrong.

Yet we live under a Department of Justice that will commit this travesty and argue it’s valid.

And:

I believe it is unlikely the indictment will survive….

…But that’s not the point, is it? The point of the indictment is to demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice is wholly an instrument of Donald Trump’s senescent pique, no more independent of him than a boil on his ass. The point is to show that the administration can, and will, use the Department’s mechanisms to punish enemies. The point is to show that the Department can, and will, punish protected speech. The point is to show that the Department is staffed by committed fanatics willing to do anything, however unethical and unconstitutional, to promote Trump.

The point is to show that in the war between Donald Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice, Trump has won. Now they’re on the field slitting the throats of the wounded and looting bodies.

The road back to credibility for the Department will be long and arduous. I do not expect it to recoup its presumption of regularity or respect within a generation.

Former DOJ official tells me: "This might be the worst case DOJ has filed in my lifetime." https://t.co/TCicYv5ggO

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 29, 2026

They’re charging James Comey for posting “8647” on his Instagram, saying it’s a threat.

Do you know how stupid this is?

I worked in food service.

When we “86’d” someone, that meant “throw them out.” Not KILL the customer.

— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) April 28, 2026

I hope that Todd Blanche doesn’t have any big plans for his legal career after Trump’s term is over.

Because he’s going to get disbarred for this blatantly unethical prosecution. pic.twitter.com/l9i82uicGP

— Turnbull (@cturnbull1968) April 28, 2026

Both sides, amirite? pic.twitter.com/JG6Bjdbkr4

— Mary L Trump (@MaryLTrump) April 28, 2026

Comey: Well, they're back. This time about a picture of seashells on a North Carolina beach a year ago. And this won't be the end of it.

But nothing has changed with me. I'm still innocent. I'm still not afraid. And I still believe in the independent federal judiciary. So let's… pic.twitter.com/3nE2sQweNy

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 28, 2026

Reports are surfacing that the Trump DOJ has indicted former FBI Director James Comey over his social media post featuring seashells forming the number "8647."

The term "86" is common restaurant and colloquial slang meaning to eject, cancel, or get rid of something—as in, "Let’s… pic.twitter.com/a23EZOzoaY

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 28, 2026

When can we expect the indictment? pic.twitter.com/oKbGtXywlO

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) April 28, 2026

Kash Patel announces the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly threatening to kill President Trump based on his “8647” social media post.

Patel says they investigated this case for 9–11 months. pic.twitter.com/oD2VlwdtVi

— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) April 28, 2026

BREAKING: James Comey was indicted for an Instagram post.

The indictment claims the photo Comey posted of Seashells was a threat to Trump’s life.

Where’s the indictment of Trump for threatening to genocide an entire civilization?

No fan of Comey but this will get thrown out. pic.twitter.com/KH5CgrjN17

— Power to the People ?? (@ProudSocialist) April 28, 2026

People are saying James Comey was indicted again for posting a shell photo that said “86 47.”

That’s not what happened.

A new grand jury returned a second indictment.

But this isn’t a brand-new case — it’s prosecutors coming back after the first one fell apart on procedural… pic.twitter.com/MRXwSllAyz

— P a u l ? (@SkylineReport) April 28, 2026

The latest Trump Justice Department indictment of James Comey is ridiculous. pic.twitter.com/lFd3qnGvUE

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) April 28, 2026

I assume the Trump DOJ will be arresting @JackPosobiec too, right?

He posted "8646" about Biden like James Comey posted "8647" about Trump.

We are living in a tyranny! Two-tiered Justice System! pic.twitter.com/wBuM4eWuo5

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 28, 2026

If you thought the last Trump DOJ indictment of James Comey was thrown out quickly…just watch the speed with which the seashell charges are tossed. DOJ is going to get humiliated. This indictment is so pathetic.

— David Shuster (@DavidShuster) April 28, 2026

JB Pritzker on James Comey: “The case is going to be thrown out, I can almost guarantee you. We’re talking about seashells on a beach. This president is guilty of inciting violence and now he’s going after people for exercising their First Amendment rights. I’m disgusted by what… pic.twitter.com/yMHfkU9a6O

— Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) April 28, 2026

The idea that there are witnesses or "documents" that show that James Comey intended to threaten to murder Donald Trump is preposterous. Todd Blanche has lost all sense of shame or honor. pic.twitter.com/nhOYO7izoA

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) April 28, 2026

It’s actually so sad to see what’s happened to the DOJ. It’ll take a century to repair.

I’ll delete my account if the James Comey indictment goes anywhere. Complete lunacy.

— Chris Mowrey (@chrisdmowrey) April 28, 2026

ID 126614242 ©
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By Samine Joudat

On the first day of Trump’s Operation Epic Fury against Iran, the United States military struck a school in the south of the country multiple times, reportedly killing at least 175 people, mostly young children.

“I swear, it was the government that hit the school,” Alireza, my 33-year-old relative, insisted in an Instagram voice message to me. He claimed that Iran’s own armed forces had struck the Minab school. I shared multiple Western media sources and investigations revealing that American Tomahawk missiles had inflicted the damage. Where did Alireza, living in Iran, attain such misinformation, and why was he adamant about his position, even after the Pentagon tacitly admitted fault?

In Iran’s hyper-polarized society, events like the Minab tragedy spawn conspiracies, suspicions, and outright denials of reality rather than shared moments for mourning. Everything is part of a struggle for narrative control of this war. Nuance be damned. The result is bitter ruptures among Iranians inside and outside of the country as we reckon with the unrest and transformation of our besieged, beloved homeland.
The Iranian government tightly controls media inside the country. This isolation is entrenched by international sanctions, which deprive ordinary citizens from accessing the world. Persian-language media based outside of Iran have filled this vacuum—and they have their own motivations and state funding sources.

In the past decade, Iran International and Manoto, two London-based channels with mysterious origins and a clear anti-Islamic Republic editorial direction, have become the de facto sources of information for millions of Iranians. Both promote the son of Iran’s deposed last king, Reza Pahlavi, as the head of an inevitable government-in-waiting. Iran International received an initial investment of $250 million from the Saudi Arabian crown prince; Manoto’s funding comes from private venture capital sources with cultural ties to Israel and fondness for the Pahlavis. Pahlavi has also received support from Israel in the form of a reported cyber campaign that created automated bot followers and fake engagement with his social media posts.

On the algorithmic battlefront, Iranian state television and media (and other accounts sympathetic to the current government such as the media collective Explosive News) have set a new standard for 21st-century AI agitprop with offerings ranging from Lego rap videos to AI-generated film trailers, all supporting a narrative of this war as an American strategic blunder and distraction from the Epstein files. Through statements on X, Iranian officials are hoping to influence panic in the oil markets and exploit Trump’s lack of cohesive messaging about this war by, well, trolling him. Official Chinese accounts have waded in. For a brief while, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to disprove convincingly an internet theory that he was dead.

We are now in a new era in which the digital world increasingly determines the analog one instead of vice versa. Donald Trump claims that Iran is a master manipulator in this kind of warfare, even as he excels at it too, timing Truth Social statements with the opening and closing of financial markets. All of this makes the intelligibility of this war an example of contemporary warfare itself. Narratives, economies, and geopolitics move in lockstep.

For many Iranians, this war has served as a depressingly stark reminder that their government and foreign actors both seek to manipulate them, eroding their agency. One ongoing debate among the Iranian diaspora concerns which state is censoring more in the war. Another centers on how many Iranians government forces killed, and under what circumstances, during the January protest massacres, which took place under the fog of an internet blackout. Numbers range from the government’s self-reported 3,117 to a U.S.-government-funded Iran human rights group (Human Rights Activists News Agency) figure of over 7,000. Iran International claimed, with uncorroborated evidence, that the deaths numbered over 36,500. Trump, meanwhile, posted 42,000 killed online while claiming 45,000 during his address on Iran on April 1.

Arguments like these have created a toxic, fractured, and paranoid global Iranian community. People on all sides claim to speak on behalf of Iranians. Meanwhile, they erase the real pain, trauma, and violence experienced by those with different political views—even as they share the same core love for their homeland. Tragedy could have led to a kind of solidarity that strengthens a future civil society. Instead, we Iranians find ourselves drawing battle lines. Charges of vatan foroosh, which literally translates to selling out your homeland, are meted out gratuitously.

For me, one of the most damning and tragic images of the past few months was the sight of Iranians in the diaspora rejoicing during the first few hours of the war. Not because the pain that they have suffered didn’t deserve a moment of respite, but because of the alienation I felt. We live in separate worlds. War was always an utter failure to me, the point of perhaps no return, where perpetrators of death and destruction placed my place of birth in their indiscriminate crosshairs. But looking at the screen, I saw that for other Iranians, war was a culmination, and something welcomed: the United States and Israel as liberators. A now semi-famous Iranian monarchist influencer based in Las Vegas found her following by doing a viral Trump dance on her TikTok and Instagram channels, celebrating the bombings. Later, in a cruel twist of irony, she shared that the attacks had killed her cousin. She blamed the Iranian government.

And yet I still find great optimism and potential in my homeland and my people. To echo the political theorist Antonio Gramsci, Iranian society from before this war is dying rapidly, and a new one struggles to be born. But there can be no future of liberation until we Iranians extricate ourselves from a deluge of information meant to manipulate and prey on our vulnerable emotions. To search for a version of our society in which Iran’s pre-Islamic and Islamic heritage and its multi-ethnic and rich cultural tapestry are unifying forces requires being honest about our own ideological biases. Many Iranians, like Americans, are guilty of consuming information that confirms what they already want to believe, with strict boundaries put up around religion, politics, and class. This is especially true in the diaspora. Civic growth requires open-mindedness, coalition-building, and messy overlaps with other Iranians of various backgrounds and beliefs.

To weave such a tapestry requires trust built on shared interests and realities. It requires a belief in values and people over states and political icons. In an always-online, meme-ified world of engagement and algorithms, building this broad coalition may be more dizzying than at any other point in contemporary history. However, an Iran worthy of the love we claim to have for it demands this of us.

Samine Joudat is an Iranian American researcher, editor, and creative director based in the Bay Area whose work revolves around the aesthetics and politics of culture. This was written for Zócalo Public Square

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I tuned up C-Span Saturday night (not my first choice for a weekend binge) with the expectation the White House Correspondents Association dinner would be darkly fascinating, like the way a multi-car crash commands attention when we rubberneck.

The very idea that the Washington press corps would actually break bread with the demagogue who’s bent on destroying them…even now, after everything that’s happened, writing those words makes me sick enough to pine for Dramamine.

But wow. What a rancid stew that was. If the writer’s room of America in Decline had ever packed so many indigestible ingredients into the same episode, the TV critics would surely have complained that it was too “on the nose.”

Before the bullets broke the evening, I was fixated on the spectacle itself. Would a firefighters convention invite an arsonist as its honored guest? Would the Fraternal Order of Police reserve a seat on the dais for a convicted criminal? The press association, which is helmed by one of Bari Weiss’ See-BS staffers, did the latter.

Then came the inherently American spasm of violence that is so inherently American. There have been 511 documented mass shootings in the last 60 years – an annual average of eight or nine – and rest assured future victims won’t have a fancy ballroom to protect them.

Within seconds the entire roomful played duck and cover – just like our school kids who face this threat on a daily basis – because nobody in power have had the slightest interest in curbing access to firearms. Nor has the press’ honored guest, who loves violence so much he impelled thousands of goons to storm the U.S. Capitol, beat up cops, and build a gallows to hang the honored guest’s veep.

Trump believes being targeted is a testament to his purported greatness. He told the press pool: “Well, you know, I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most (get shot at)… Just take a look at the names here. The big names. And I hate to say I’m honored by that, but I’ve done a lot…When you’re impactful, (shooters) go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone.”

So he feels “honored.” But his assassination study deserves a D. It’s an historical fact that Gerald Ford was not impactful, yet he was targeted twice. James Garfield was in office only four months, with no time to be impactful, when he was shot. Ronald Reagan was in office only two months when he was shot by a nut who was trying to impress Jodie Foster. But the White House press pool, for which I have some sympathy, had to sit there and listen to his nonsense because the quality of discourse has been so degraded.

Speaking of degraded: He managed to mumble one rote sentence that his aides had surely crafted, mindful of the horrors that had so recently transpired. Here it is, in its entirety: “I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts and resolving our differences peacefully. We have to – we have to resolve our differences.”

Then, less than 24 hours later, during a quickie sitdown for “60 Minutes,” when he was asked whether there’s anything a president can do about political violence, he replied: “I do think the hate speech of the Democrats is very dangerous. I do think that the hate speech of the Democrats much more so is – is very dangerous.” That, from the guy who joked about Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting beaten with a hammer and said nothing last year when two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers were assassinated by a MAGA extremist.

Nor does the press association’s honored guest seem willing to “resolve” his “differences” with the press. When “60 Minutes” host Nora O’Donnell asked him to comment on the alleged shooter’s manifesto – which said, “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes” – he lashed out in predictable snowflake mode:

“Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you’re – you’re he – you’re horrible people. Horrible people…I said to myself, ‘You know, I’ll do this interview and they’ll probably’ – I read the manifesto. You know, he’s a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that…You’re a disgrace. But go ahead. Let’s finish the interview. You – you’re disgraceful.”

So there it was, a toxic trifecta: Obsequious banquet starring an unprecedented enemy of the free press, gun violence rendering the event DOA, and narcissism and nonsense in the aftermath from the unrepentant honored guest.

In the 1987 movie “Broadcast News,” the TV producer played by Holly Hunter arrives at the correspondents dinner and nears the security checkpoint. But at the last second she veers away, fearful that the inspectors will unclasp her purse and discover the condoms she’d packed for an envisioned tryst with William Hurt.

Not a gun in sight anywhere. That’s more my speed.

Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com

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The very first thing Donald Trump talked about after the shooting was his stupid illegal ballroom

I think the mentalist who was scheduled to host last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner should have received combat pay. Not because of an assassination attempt, but for having to roam through Donald Trump’s empty head.

I don’t believe last night’s assassination attempt was staged or fake. I do believe there was a serious assassination attempt at last night’s WHCD dinner. I don’t want to jump into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. But from what we know at this point, the assassination attempt may not have been on Trump’s life, but maybe just on any cabinet member’s life that the attempted shooter could’ve found, or at least that’s how it sounds from the bits of his manifesto. I have read. [Editor’s note: The would-be assassin has been charged with the attempted assassination of Trump.]

I do believe it was extremely crappy for Donald Trump to use the assassination attempt as an argument for his stupid illegal ballroom that is currently being held up by a court. Sure, it would have been a much safer event for politicians if the event had been held in a restrictive confine such as the White House rather than a working hotel with over 1100 rooms. But the lack of a tacky Maga-Lardo-like ballroom created by tearing down the East Wing of the White House doesn’t prevent events from being held at the White House.

That said, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not a government event. It is hosted by the White House Correspondents Association, and has been held at the Washington Hilton for years without incident. And let me get ahead of MAGAts who will use the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan at the hotel as an argument for the ballroom, as that did not happen during the WHCD dinner.

Trump cannot be allowed to use last night-near tragic event as a reason to ignore his breaking the law to build his pet project of an ugly ballroom. He can’t be allowed to use last night’s near-tragic event to circumvent oversight of this ballroom. He can’t be allowed to use it to avoid telling the public how much money he’s raised for the project and who has contributed to it. All of that is currently being kept secret by the Trump regime. Remember that despite being invited to this dinner by journalists, he is an enemy of a free press and transparency.

Scott Jennings, a MAGAt and a CNN contributor, should not be allowed to use last night’s near-tragic event to go after Democrats as he politicizes the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which needs to be held in check over the tactics of ICE. He argues that the Secret Service is not being funded during this shutdown, but fails to mention that the agents are still being paid. Fuck you, Scott Jennings, you dishonest fuck. CNN, when you have breaking news, you should only have real journalists on the air. Not Kool-Aid drinking ass heads like Scott Jennings. Isn’t it bad enough we have to stomach Wolf Blitzer?

Fox News and MAGAts should not be allowed to make Donald Trump and members of his administration heroes from this. Nobody was in danger. The Secret Service did their job when they found the potential shooter, but they never should have allowed him to get as close as he did.

The White House Correspondents Association never should have changed the format of the dinner in hopes that Donald Trump would finally attend. As I mentioned in the first paragraph. The night’s entertainment and host was a mentalist. They may as well have invited someone to make animal balloons because I’m not sure there’s substance to having a dinner hosted by a mind reader. I would argue that the dinner could have been hosted by a clown, but that would have been redundant.

Usually, the dinner is hosted by a comedian who roasts the president and people in the room, from politicians to members of the press. And while Donald Trump once attended this dinner while Obama was president, he was too cowardly to attend while he was president during his first term or last year, the first year of his second term. A comedian was not the host last year, which was probably the WHCA’s attempt to get Trump to attend then.

Don’t get the impression that Donald Trump can take a joke because he was a subject of a roast on Comedy Central years ago. He was able to set the rules for that event, with one of them being that none of the comedians could make fun of his wealth or cast any doubt as to the extent of it.

And why would Donald Trump be afraid of a comedian at last night’s gala? Maybe he’s afraid a good comedian will point out his racism, his sexism, his failed war with Iran, or bring up his assault on women, or his attacks on the Capitol, or that he lost the 2020 election, or that he’s about to lose the 2026 midterms, or his theft of classified information, or his 34 indictments, or his constant grift of the Oval Office, or that he lied over 35,000 lies during his first term, or joke about the bruises on his hands or his cankles, or bring up the fact that he is an enemy to a Free Press, which he has called the “enemy of the American people.”

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Visit Clay Jones’ website and email him at clayjonz@gmail.com.

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