Recent data on Obamacare enrollment suggests that Ohio has seen the largest declines in the nation. But experts say the numbers may be skewed, and fraud may have had a significant impact as well.

Based on data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, between February 2025 and February 2026, Affordable Care Act enrollment numbers in Ohio dropped from 497,443 to 336,058, a 32.4% decrease, as reported by Signal Ohio. That’s about three times the national average.

Soon after those numbers were released, the Paragon Institute released an analysis as well, which credited the decline, in part, to the removal of “phantom” enrollees.

In an interview with the Daily Signal, Paragon Institute President Brian Blase, who co-authored the study, described phantom enrollees as individuals who “had no medical claims” and “didn’t use their health plan a single time.” A chart included in the analysis shows that 35% of enrollees in Ohio in 2024 were “zero-claim.”

“[That makes Ohio] definitely one of the more problematic states,” he said.

Between 2022 and 2025, Blase explained, Ohio had “a huge increase in improper and phantom enrollees,” after which changes were made.

“When the advanced subsidies went away and additional program integrity checks came in, a large number of those improper and phantom enrollees moved off the program,” he said.

Rush Sign-Ups Lead to Steep Drop-Offs

Another reason for the drop may relate to the rapid rise in enrollments in previous years.

“Ohio’s decline is large … but the increase in Ohio’s enrollment in the previous two years was like the highest in the country,” Blase said. “I think they probably had some really bad, unscrupulous brokers and enrollee intermediaries that enrolled a lot of people in the program that had no idea they were covered by the program.

“And now, as the enhanced subsidies went away, and there’s some additional eligibility checks, those people are appropriately coming off the program.”

Blase noted the time period is important too, as the Biden administration “pursued and implemented a lot of policies that enabled enrollment, regardless of proper eligibility reviews.”

CMS Numbers ‘Incomplete’

Edmund Haislmaier, a health care policy expert at The Heritage Foundation, said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services numbers from 2025 to 2026 require more context.

“The data is somewhat inferior and incomplete because it doesn’t look at the whole market,” he told the Daily Signal.

Haislmaier said a better metric to use is insurance market data for the whole market “based on regulatory filings.” Every quarter, insurers in every state have to file, and that data gets aggregated by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

According to Haislmaier, at the end of the fourth quarter of 2025, there were 490,000 people on the books in Ohio. At the end of the first quarter of 2026, there were 425,000 people, a decline of only 13.2%.

The company that saw the largest decline in enrollments, Haislmaier said, is Centene Corporation, a Medicaid-managed care company. That company’s enrollments dropped 45%.

The Role of Fraud

Blase and Haislmaier both said the numbers may be skewed by various schemes involving brokers and agents who enroll people without their knowledge or consent.

One scheme, Blase explained, involves going to lower-income areas, obtaining people’s social security information, and signing them up for a plan without their knowledge. Another, conducted over social media, promised that individuals would get free cash or gift cards if people called a certain number and signed up to enroll in a health insurance plan.

“These people got enrolled, and the reason that the improper and phantom enrollment persisted is because the subsidies were made so large that people didn’t have any of their own premium payment,” Blase explained.

When asked if cracking down on fraud played a role in declines, Blase said that’s a “huge part of it.” His analysis shows “very tight correlations” between fraudulent enrollment and recent declines.

“States that had more improper and phantom enrollees had far greater loss of exchange enrollment than states that didn’t have as many,” he said.

Haislmaier spoke about people being enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans, or having their plans switched, without their knowledge.

“The person could be real, and they could be switching plans … and you don’t know it. And then when you use your insurance, they say, ‘Well, you’re not covered here anymore. You switched plans,'” he said.

And in plans that didn’t bill a monthly premium, many individual enrollees didn’t know they were signed up.

According to Haislmaier, Centene and Molina were two companies that offered plans with zero premiums in many of Ohio’s 17 rating areas across the state’s 88 counties.

“Because Centene and Molina were offering the lowest-cost silver plans, the second- or first-lowest-cost silver plans, in 15 out of 17 rating areas in Ohio, they were more exposed than other insurers to potential improper enrollment,” he said.

“Medicaid managed care [organizations] that are more likely to be exposed to low-income fraud are the ones who seem to be losing enrollments,” he added.

Subsidies Dried Up—or Did They?

Declining subsidies has been raised as an alternative theory for why fewer people are signing up for Obamacare. However, Blase countered that argument, saying current subsidies “are very generous” and the program continues to cap premiums people have to play.

“The vast majority of the premium increase over time has been borne by the federal government, so the affordability issue is really just for people four times above the poverty line,” he said.

“When they expanded the subsidies, they made the subsidies more generous for everybody. They also lifted the cap that existed at four times the poverty line, and so that meant when the enhanced subsidies went away, people just above four times the poverty line faced the biggest financial shock, and that was a very small number of overall Obamacare enrollees. So, it can’t be the reason for the enrollment declines.”

Where Are They Going?

One question raised by Ohio’s drop in Obamacare enrollees is where people are getting their health insurance now. Although it’s not clear where people go, “there’s a lot of possible explanations,” Haislmaier said.

Freelancers who formerly needed Obamacare may no longer need it if they become employees and gain benefits, Haislmaier offered as one example. Others might have had a change in income, and some Ohioans are going to fluctuate between Medicaid and the exchange based on income, he added.

Blase mentioned another option for how people are getting coverage: individuals may use insurance plans from others in their household, health sharing plans, or short-term limited duration plans.

“For the vast majority of legitimate Obamacare enrollees, they’re just going to go to another Obamacare plan,” Blase said.

As for the “phantoms” who had no claims and never once used their plans, Blase said “the phantoms are likely already enrolled in other types of coverage,” as they’re “duplicate enrollees” in Medicaid or an employer plan.

“They already have other sources of coverage, so you’re just reducing a duplicate form of coverage for them.”

President Donald Trump slammed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax on certain second properties in a Tuesday post on Truth Social and threatened federal action.

The president said the tax “is costing New York City and State a fortune in that the money, eventually to be gotten, is very little compared to to [sic] the TAXES PAID by the tens of thousands of people who are fleeing the City, never to return. Florida, Texas, and numerous other States, are making an absolute fortune!”

“I am looking to see if the Federal Government has any legal right to avert this disaster, before it is too late, for the millions of people who cherish New York and want to see it thrive, as opposed to becoming a filthy, crime ridden, decrepit place of mockery and scorn,” Trump stated.

On Monday, Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi ruled that the city must remove the tax listing of 960,000 properties it posted online in July. That followed a lawsuit by three homeowners who said that “the City incorrectly identified their homes as potentially subject to the surcharge despite those properties serving as their primary residences.”

Randy Mastro, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that the ruling “vindicated the rights of hundreds of thousands of New York City homeowners who were subjected to a process they never should have been a part of in the first place.”

The lawsuit did not challenge Mamdani’s tax; rather, it challenged the implementation by which the names, addresses, and property values of secondary residences were listed online, despite some of those properties serving as primary residences. Plaintiffs said the burden of proof to determine eligibility for the tax should be on the city, not homeowners, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The judge ordered the city to cease “continuing to post on the website of the New York City Department of Finance, or otherwise allowing public access to, the Supplemental Roll listing the names, addresses, and property values of more than 900,000 New York City homeowners described by the City Respondents as ‘related to’ the Surcharge.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that the “court also banned the city from taking any additional enforcement action on the tax warning notices that have already been mailed to 17,000 homeowners.”

Critics of the tax celebrated the ruling on social media.

“A Staten Island judge just stopped [Zohran Mamdani]’s tax machine cold, and exposed how reckless his administration really is,” Joseph Hernandez, a Republican running for state comptroller, wrote on X.

Mamdani said that he would challenge the ruling and insisted that the pied-à-terre tax would eventually go into effect.

“We disagree with today’s ruling, but we are confident in both the pied-à-terre surcharge and the City’s ability to implement it fairly and effectively,” Mamdani spokesman Matt Rauschenbach said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “This surcharge asks those who own second homes valued at $5 million or more to contribute their fair share to the city they benefit from.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who approved the tax, along with state lawmakers, said, according to the New York Post, that the state was “not responsible for the rollout” and that it was up to New York City to “streamline” the process of implementation.

“While this lawsuit about the administration of the tax is a matter for the city and the courts to work through, the Governor continues to believe that people who can afford a multimillion-dollar second home in New York City can afford to pay their fair share,” a Hochul spokesperson said, according to the Post.

Last week, democratic socialist Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democrat primary for U.S. Senate, securing 48.5% of the vote. El-Sayed will now face former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in a toss-up November race that could determine control of the Senate.

This result is not an isolated event. Across the country, socialists and other radical left-wing candidates continue to find electoral success. Many have defeated establishment Democrats in state and local races, expanding the influence of an ideology once confined to deep-blue urban districts. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson are among those elected who have begun advancing economically interventionalist agendas.

For those unaware, the appropriate number of anti-American communists and socialists in the U.S. government is zero.

These ideologies are antithetical to Western values and American exceptionalism. Communism’s radical policies—large-scale expansion of government control in everything from health care and education to industry—are incompatible with the tradition of limited government, free markets, and individual liberties that has historically underpinned American prosperity.

Nations that experiment with central planning experience harmful socioeconomic outcomes like shortages, stifled innovation, poverty, and large-scale human suffering. Yet, these approaches have gained traction on the woke Left and now form core elements of the platforms advanced by many new candidates.

The Democratic Socialists of America has drastically expanded its membership and electoral footprint. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., remain the only two DSA-affiliated politicians in Congress, but dozens of others have infiltrated state and local governments. That number is likely to grow given socialism’s rising popularity among progressive and younger voters.

The national co-chair of the DSA recently reaffirmed several of the organization’s longstanding policy positions, including abolishing the Senate, eradicating prisons, eliminating national borders, and pursuing public ownership or heavy regulation of major organizations. Many socialist candidates align closely with that direction: “Medicare for All,” abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, free education and childcare, tax hikes, and public ownership of select firms.

These positions move well beyond the conventional progressive goals of higher taxes and expanded social programs; they challenge the core features of the American constitutional system built upon principles of self-government and free markets.

Government ownership or heavy regulation of major industries would weaken competition, discourage investment, and stifle the very innovation that drives economic growth. Expanding government control over health care, housing, and education would increase bureaucratic inefficiency, reduce quality, and limit consumer choice.

Massive increases in federal spending and entitlement programs would explode deficits, balloon the national debt, and place greater tax burdens on American families and businesses. The imminent effect of a communist economic approach is not prosperity but concentration of market and institutional power in the hands of the state.

The very ideology the DSA espouses has been responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people through famine, purges, and repression—most notably under Mao Zedong in Communist China. By contrast, free-market capitalism has lifted over 1 billion people out of extreme poverty and has improved living standards across the globe faster than any competing economic system.

New socialist policymakers insist their vision operates through democracy rather than tyranny, but their policy toolkit—government ownership, price controls, and dismantling American institutions—carries the same risks of expanded state authority, inefficiency, and human casualties that were documented under 20th-century communist experiments.

Younger Americans, a key constituency of socialist or communist candidates, are rightfully dissatisfied with the state of the economy. High college tuition and student loan costs, a tight labor market, and unaffordable housing make the American dream feel out of reach. These problems deserve serious solutions, but socialist systems that rely on government intervention are not the answer.

Centralized policy prescriptions have repeatedly lowered the standard of living for millions of people across the globe. A government that promises “free groceries” and controls the food supply has the power to starve you; one in charge of housing has the power to move you into an assigned low-quality unit or onto the street; state-owned energy can leave you freezing or in the dark; and a government that nationalizes health care decides whose life is worth saving.

Despite its imperfections, capitalism—rooted in private property rights, free-market competition, and limited government—offers the most reliable and sustainable path to broad-based prosperity.

With communism on the rise, how the country navigates this moment will shape living standards, individual liberty, and the durability of the United States for decades to come. The choice is freedom versus control, prosperity versus poverty, and capitalism versus communism.

For Americans, that choice is simple: Renew the principles and promises of our great nation’s founding 250 years later and watch the economy flourish.

While campaigning in North Texas last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democrat state Rep. James Talarico offered differing plans for tackling affordability issues facing Texans.

Paxton, who held an event in Allen, discussed his plan for addressing affordability, which he called “Protecting the Texas Promise.”

Paxton’s plan centers on reducing taxes for homeowners and providing parents with a larger tax credit.

He proposed an annual $25,000 federal tax deduction for all out-of-pocket medical expenses, with an additional $25,000 deduction for each dependent; a $50,000 tax deduction for first-time homebuyers; and a $5,000 tax deduction for expenses related to a healthy lifestyle, such as gym memberships and GLP-1 medications.

Paxton also said he wants to double the child tax credit to $4,400 per child under 17 and make Trump Accounts for children permanent.

Meanwhile, Talarico held an event in Arlington, where he detailed his “New American Dream” plan to address affordability.

Talarico’s plan calls for rebuilding labor unions, canceling medical debt, and preventing hospitals from overcharging patients.

Talarico also said he wants to raise the federal minimum wage to more than $15 an hour, calling the current federal rate of $7.25 inadequate.

“I’ll fight to unrig this economy,” Talarico said during the Arlington event. “I’ll fight to raise your pay. I’ll fight to lower your costs. And unlike Ken Paxton, I’ll fight to keep your hard-earned money where it belongs, in your pocket.”

James Quintero, policy director for the Taxpayer Protection Project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told the Daily Signal that an economic plan involving increased government spending and intervention is problematic.

“An economic agenda that calls for increased public expenditure or greater government intervention fundamentally misunderstands both the problem and the solution. It is destined for failure,” Quintero said. 

Talarico also criticized President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which eliminated taxes on tips and overtime work and extended and expanded roughly $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to working-class families.

Talarico called Trump’s bill the “Big, Ugly Bill.”

“It’s time to raise the minimum wage and expand overtime pay so workers can actually share in the wealth they create,” he said. “It’s time to repeal the Big, Ugly Bill’s tax breaks for the top 1% and give that $1 trillion to the middle class in the form of a cost-of-living tax cut.”

Quintero said that instead of increasing government involvement in the economy, affordability will rebound when government spending and intervention are reduced.

“Human flourishing will rebound when the spenders, schemers, and socialists are routed, and the family budget put first,” Quintero said.

The competing affordability proposals come as Talarico and Paxton remain locked in a closely contested Senate race.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Talarico held a 1.6% lead over Paxton between June 3 and July 30.

Paxton’s and Talarico’s campaigns did not return the Daily Signal’s requests for comment by publication.

President Donald Trump secretly boarded an alternate military aircraft for his July 8 flight from Ankara, Turkey, due to an assassination threat from Iran, The Washington Post first reported.

At the end of his trip to the 2026 NATO summit in Turkey, Trump boarded Air Force One as usual, then slipped into a catering truck that carried him to an alternate aircraft, according to the Post. Once on board Air Force One, the press pool was instructed to keep their window shades closed. Members of the press pool and even some White House staff believed he was traveling aboard the aircraft.

Trump had flown to Turkey in a new plane gifted by Qatar, but he said he would fly partway home on the old aircraft “for old time’s sake.” He said the plane would make a previously unscheduled stop on the way back to the United States at Royal Air Force Mildenhall in the U.K.

At Mildenhall, photojournalists took pictures of Trump disembarking from Air Force One, suggesting he had reboarded the aircraft out of sight of the press. Trump then traveled with reporters from Mildenhall back to Washington, D.C.

The White House has neither confirmed nor denied the story.

“Well, I have a threat all the time,” he said July 8 in response to a reporter’s question about a threat from Iran. “I’m No. 1 on their list before you. But if I go, you go.

Trump’s move is not unprecedented, as in 2000, President Bill Clinton pulled off a similar ruse. Clinton flew from Pakistan to India on an unmarked plane that followed Air Force One.

Sen. Bernie Sanders claimed on the Senate floor that noncitizen voting is a myth, just months before New Jersey officials admitted about 400 noncitizens had voted in state elections.

“The good news is that noncitizens do not vote in American elections,” the Vermont independent who caucuses with Democrats asserted in a March 19 floor speech.

The problem is not exclusive to New Jersey, which announced last week that a glitch caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered to vote. Numerous state audits and criminal convictions contradict what some politicians have said on noncitizen voting being nonexistent.

In the House, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., was equally adamant last year after voting against the SAVE Act, asserting, “Let me be perfectly clear: This is a non-issue. Noncitizens do not vote in U.S. elections.”

However, a 2017 Pennsylvania Department of State analysis identified 1,160 people who apparently self-reported that they were noncitizens and voluntarily canceled their voter registrations. Of those, 248 had voted at least once, casting a total of 642 ballots, according to testimony provided to the Pennsylvania House State Government Committee. Most of those votes occurred between 2000 and 2017.

More recently, a 2025 Ohio audit found 167 noncitizens had voted between 2018 and 2024, while other state audits found numbers in the double digits.

“The truth is, are noncitizens voting in the tens of thousands? Absolutely not,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told the Daily Signal. “But it is happening.”

Over the last decade, 40 aliens were convicted of ineligible voting across multiple states, including heavily populated Florida, Texas, and California, as well as the battleground states of North Carolina and Wisconsin, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database.

Another 14, all from North Carolina, were sentenced to a diversion program in cases from 2021 and 2022. Another four, between 2016 and 2019, were also sentenced to a diversion program.

Many opponents of the SAVE America Act, which requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and a government-issued ID to vote, include the caveat that noncitizen voting is rare, especially when compared with the total number of votes cast in elections. However, many races for local offices, including seats in state legislatures, have been decided by just a handful of votes.

A Public Interest Legal Foundation database going back to 1992 shows that 1,372 state elections ended in a tie, and another 530 were decided by a single vote.

Over the last decade in Ohio, 75 elections either ended in a tie or were decided by one vote. Pennsylvania, which the foundation is suing for records, has dozens of deadlocked or one-vote elections every year. Since 2021, two elections in New Jersey resulted in a tie and another four came down to one vote, according to the database.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security released estimates showing that four states—California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and New Jersey—had 256,463 noncitizens on their voter registration lists. None of the states cooperated with the agency to identify noncitizens.

However, 25 states have worked with the Department of Homeland Security, using its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database to cross-check voter registration data. The 10 states that completed the process found about 28,000 noncitizens.

Adams noted the problem of how states implement the National Voter Registration Act, better known as the motor voter law, under which voter registration is offered with a driver’s license at a Department of Motor Vehicles office.

“This is not a conspiracy with bad intentions, this is just a broken system,” Adams said. “People mark ‘no’ on the citizenship box at the DMV and they still are offered a voter registration form. When you have a voter registration form shoved in their face, an unsophisticated noncitizen is going to think he’s eligible to vote, otherwise why would the bureaucrat offer it.”

In January, the FBI concluded that 38 noncitizens may have voted in Nevada in the 2020 election, but then the bureau closed the inquiry, CBS News reported. An FBI review of Nevada voter rolls was compared with Department of Homeland Security citizenship data and found 38 likely noncitizens.

A March 2025 audit by the Iowa secretary of state’s office found 35 noncitizens voted in the 2024 election out of 277 registered to vote. An audit by the Michigan secretary of state’s office found just 15 noncitizens voted in the battleground state in 2024.

The North Carolina Board of Elections released an audit in 2017 showing 41 noncitizens cast ballots in the 2016 election. An error, discovered in 2024 in Oregon, led to more than 1,200 registered noncitizens on the state’s voter rolls, though Oregon found that just nine of them voted.

Last year, the Louisiana secretary of state’s office found 390 noncitizens registered to vote, and 79 voted, but over a span of four decades.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. We’ve talked about the Women’s National Basketball Association on prior occasions. There’d be no real reason to talk about it any longer, but these incidents keep popping up. In the past, the sensational star Caitlin Clark was attacked by Alyssa Thomas.

That was that vicious fist to her neck when she was on the ground that caused an uproar and had racial and sexual overtones, and then reflected on the status itself of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Now we’ve got a kind of replay, but with different actors. We have Sophie Cunningham, who’s on the same Indiana team as Caitlin Clark, and she was recently dribbling with a clear, easy layup at the basket, and she was being chased by DiJonai Carrington from the opposite team.

And instead of just fouling her to prevent an easy layup by maybe pushing her hips, as often happens, she chose to clothesline her. She took her entire arm and hit her neck and flattened her. Flagrant foul. She was kicked out of the game, and then she almost immediately racialized the episode by texting or posting on social media, “White privilege.”

I thought that was kind of ironic for an African American young woman to complain about white people when she’s wearing a blond wig, and according to the DEI parlance, she’s culturally appropriating the appearance of a different race, and we’re not supposed to do that. I know that if Sophie Cunningham had been dribbling and she had dreadlocks, people would be very critical of her.

So, it was kind of a weird thing, and it got even weirder because it exposed the problem of the Women’s National Basketball Association. Again, because nobody really stuck up for Sophie Cunningham. In fact, some members faulted her for previously remarking in an interview that she thought transgender women should not be allowed to, if they were biological males, to play in female sports where their height and weight and muscular advantage, i.e., their DNA, gave them enormous advantages that could hurt women, and the same would be true of hurting women that were underage in high school or junior high who were showering and dressing with biological men.

So, that commentary by Sophie Cunningham may have been the subtext of this attack on her because we’ve had coaches in the Women’s National Basketball Association wear jackets promoting the trans issue. We had a co-owner of the Seattle team harass two young girl fans, and all they had were signs to the effect of “Support Sophie,” and the co-owner went over and swore at them and abused them and was given a suspension herself.

We’ve had referees who’ve obviously ignored flagrant fouls against both Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark. And so, this is an ongoing angry league. And now with the trans issue, they really stepped into it because they have been on record–they being the commissioner and the owners–that they cannot define what a male is or a woman is.

That, in other words, if you say that you’re a transgender female and somebody says, well, you’re not because your muscular, skeletal DNA suggests otherwise, and you have the sexual characteristics of a male, but you say you’re female, that doesn’t work. You can’t just declare what your gender is.

And they kind of brushed that off. And now two former NBA players who retired, they have pensions, but of course, given Caitlin Clark has enriched this league and brought in, according to some economists, a billion dollars in aggregate new revenue, whether defined by increased fan attendance, which has soared, or media contracts, which have soared, lucrative contracts, or merchandising opportunities, which have soared.

A once near-bankrupt, subsidized, very isolated, and unknown league is now on everybody’s imagination, and there are people who want to get in on it. So, two men think, well, if they’re paying suddenly $500,000 a year, I can just say that I’m a woman. I’ll put on a wig or something, and then maybe I’ll wear a dress that day. And because you can now create your own gender and the league is on record that they don’t have a definition of what actually a transgender person is vis-a-vis a biological male or female, they have no right to tell me I can’t play. And of course, they won’t believe that I can dominate the league, and they won’t stop me from showering with some very attractive women.

And so, now the league is in a dilemma because their own politically correct DEI rhetoric has put them on the horns of a dilemma. Do they sound like Sophie Cunningham and say, “No, you men, you cannot play because you can’t declare your sexuality contrary to your biological DNA nature”? You can’t do that. Or do they stick to their guns and destroy the league by inviting biological males, as Sophie Cunningham has warned they would destroy the league with their greater advantages in size and strength and endurance?

But what’s behind all this? Why do we even talk about this? Nobody cared about the Women’s National Basketball Association. I don’t mean to denigrate it, but nobody knew it existed. If you asked the average American to name two teams, they could not name them prior to 2024.

So, from 1997 to 2024, nobody knew what this league was about. It was perpetually losing money, somewhere around $20 million to $40 million a year, that had to be either subsidized by the owners themselves, who maybe believed in women’s basketball, or they believed that they wanted a different demographic. Who knows what they believed, but they were willing to lose money because they never made any money for 20 years.

And then the National Basketball Association thought it was a good PR outreach to have a women’s version, a female version, and they were willing to subsidize that $20 million, $30 million, $40 million loss. Then Caitlin Clark comes along. As I said, she brings in a billion dollars of revenue. All of a sudden, there’s all of this drama about Caitlin Clark, her people trying to hurt her, Sophie Cunningham trying to protect her, people going after Sophie Cunningham, and people know about the WNBA.

And the result is the players are flying private to their practices and games. They’re paid $500,000 on average. Many of them are making several million dollars, $5 million, $10 million a year in merchandising and media appearances, etc., etc. In other words, Caitlin Clark single-handedly put the WNBA on the map, and that’s what the problem is, because the WNBA was sort of a little unknown league that was 65% black.

People had suggested it was 35% to 40% gay, and they sort of had their own little atmosphere, their own culture, and they weren’t really being rewarded, but they controlled the ownership, the coaches, the referees, the players, all were on this DEI left-wing page. And suddenly, the great benefactors of all of them happened to be white heterosexuals like Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham, and they didn’t want that.

In other words, they were willing to commit violence against them, and the league was either going to condone it or plead ignorance rather than all benefit. And there was one subtext that no one talks about, but it’s right there staring us in the face: that Caitlin Clark is probably the best player, and that’s not supposed to happen in a predominantly gay, black female league.

Doesn’t mean that other players are not nearly as good, but we haven’t seen anybody like her in women’s national basketball. And in the case of Sophie Cunningham, she’s tall, she’s beautiful, she’s blond, she’s white, and people resent that as well. You put those two figures together, they create all this controversy and hostility, and they remind America that something is definitely wrong with this league.

It encourages racism, it encourages sexual prejudice, it encourages violence, and nobody wants to touch it. And if it continues, maybe they’ll lose Sophie Cunningham, and they would lose Caitlin Clark, and if they lost both of them, they would go back to their preferred obscurity and poverty.

Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The Democratic Party could take another decisive turn as Francesca Hong faces David Crowley for the gubernatorial nomination on Tuesday.

Hong is a state legislator and member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Crowley is viewed as the establishment candidate, being endorsed by Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers. Tuesday’s open primary race is another instance of centrist Democrats attempting to keep control of their party as they face off against a strong progressive fringe.

In the last year alone, dozens of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have clinched their party’s nomination. These include Abdul El-Sayed, in the Michigan Senate race, and Zohran Mamdani, in the New York City mayoral race.

Although Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, remains optimistic about the outcome, polls indicate that Hong has a fair chance of securing the Democratic Party’s support.

“You know, it’s the only time I know that Gov. Tony Evers, the Republican Governors Association, and Turning Point USA have ever been on the same page—in thinking that Francesca Hong is the best candidate to lose this race,” Crowley said at a campaign event on Friday.

More of the Same?

Crowley, who has been characterized as part of the Wisconsin Democrat establishment, served in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 2017 to 2020 before working as a county executive. He has the endorsement of Evers, the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Laborers District Council. He also has the support of Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., the whip of the Congressional Black Caucus.

In the state assembly, Crowley “led passage of Wisconsin Act 12,” a landmark bipartisan revenue reform that overhauled state and local revenue sharing. As county executive, he signed the largest property tax cut in Milwaukee County history.

In his current run for governor, Crowley has promised to expand childcare, back electoral redistricting, and push for universal early childhood education.

Democratic Socialism?

Hong, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, has campaigned on a platform of universal childcare, gender-affirming care, increased rental regulations, and “taxing the rich,” according to her campaign website.

During her campaign, Hong stood alongside Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who advocated for similar policies while serving in the Minnesota State Assembly. At the start of 2026, Omar’s congressional district was home to widespread health care, daycare, and education fraud.

On her website, Hong calls for fully abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and giving illegal aliens government-issued IDs as well as in-state college tuition.

Like Mamdani, Hong also has promised to create taxpayer-funded grocery stores while abolishing taxes imposed on unions.

Other policies Hong supports include abolishing life sentences for juveniles, legalizing marijuana, and enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution.

Hasan Piker

If Hong were to clinch the nomination on Tuesday, she could be campaigning with Turkish-heritage online streamer Hasan Piker again.

Piker, a self-proclaimed socialist with a net worth between $2 million and $8 million, has generated controversy for many past comments, including that America “deserved 9/11.”

The streamer also called for the murder of Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and other capitalists, and said that Western countries need to import more immigrants so that they can forcibly breed with white women to “abolish the white race.”

On Monday, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., wrote an op-ed for The Free Press in which he condemned figures like Piker for attempting to “hijack” the Democratic Party’s “values, ideals, and leadership.”

On the median of an intersection near the Capitol building in Richmond, a well-dressed yet disheveled beggar is seen holding a sign: “Unemployed. Will Politic for Food.”

This is the fate awaiting whoever it was that thought it would be a good idea to send Gov. Abigail Spanberger to the 90th Annual Galax Old Fiddlers Convention.

I’m not a high-paid political operative, but I know how to read a room. What were they thinking?

Thousands of attendees were there to simply hear music and spend a week at the “Gateway to the Blue Ridge.” Those people are the very people whose gun rights the governor is trying to take away. Those people are the ones that would have been hardest hit by all those sales tax increases she and the Democrat leadership in the General Assembly wanted to levy. Galax’s median household income is about 45% below the Virginia state average of $74,957.

We’ve seen at least 40 different videos of the crowd at the event booing the governor loudly, and they are only just starting to be re-posted by GOP and conservative bloggers. In a political party that is driven by public perception of across-the-board popularity, this is bad.

How bad? On a scale where Terry McAuliffe’s “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” gaffe is a 10, this is most likely a 7. It’s not fatal, but it makes her goal of being nominated for president in 2028 a long shot. Maybe she’d settle for a return to Langley as CIA director? Or director of National Intelligence? The irony would be great—but lost on everyone but us.

Rest assured that political action committees aligned with her opponents will have digital ads flooding each state’s primary voters with that video, with the narration saying, “If they don’t like her in Virginia …” or words to that effect.

Sending Spanberger to Galax, where she received 31.7% of the vote in 2025, shows a failure of executive decision making. She won 21.4% in Carrol County and 21.5% in Grayson County. It’s not exactly “Spanberger Country.” And that was before the gun grabs and proposed tax hikes. That’s before the electricity bills, with Appalachian Power asking the State Corporation Commission for a $61.4 million increase in base rates to cover rising system costs.

In her defense, you can say that she went there because she is the governor of all Virginians. But if you make your first seven months in office an unending succession of attempts to damage or defame the community’s way off life, after having driven out the furniture industry that it relied on, don’t expect them to invite you for barbeque. (That’s a noun, Madame Governor.)

I guess she can hold out hope that Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro gets caught not knowing what “wit’ or wit’out?” means when ordering a cheesesteak at Pat’s or Gino’s, or Gavin Newsom brags to the black community about how low his test scores were. Oh, wait, that actually happened.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday calling for changes to the child vaccine schedule, including splitting up one vaccine into separate shots spaced out over time.

“My administration is recognizing gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations for only 11 core vaccinations against the most serious and dangerous diseases, along with the [Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine], which hopefully will be split up,” Trump said.

“We want it in three separate vaccinations, given at separate times,” he added. “Together, there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal. And separately, it looks like they are not at all lethal, but just very effective.”

The order also directs the attorney general to pursue legal challenges against states that “violate children’s rights to religious or medical vaccination exemptions.”

Trump said he believes these changes will combat the increase in autism in children.

“Every year gets higher, higher, higher—autism—and we think we have a very good recommendation,” he said.

In other countries, parents vaccinate their children even without government mandates, Trump said.

“It’s up to the parents if they wish, and they will be covered by insurance,” he said. “However, this updated recommendation finally aligns the United States with other advanced and developed nations around the world.”

National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said this updated recommendation will “restore the autonomy of families and parents to make good decisions for their for their kids.”

“It allows and continues to emphasize the importance of science in recommendations about vaccines,” said National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, “and fundamentally restores a sort of healthy relationship between public health and parents, more in line with what happens in European countries than than in the United States.”

Dr. Heidi Overton, head of the Domestic Policy Council, clarified the difference between Monday’s announcement and other actions on vaccines. The Trump administration previously overhauled the childhood vaccine schedule, but that effort was held up in court, Overton said. She added that the new executive order gives the public access to information the administration says was blocked by the court.

“You are correcting that wrong today,” Overton said, “and saying ‘I am giving Americans this information directly so that they know what HHS found in the scientific assessment themselves.'”

A Texas conservative activist is suing the Houston Independent School District after the school board removed her from a meeting for reading sexually explicit passages from a book available in the district’s school libraries.

Bonnie Wallace, who lives in the Texas Hill Country, has attended multiple school board meetings to show trustees that books containing sexually explicit material are available in their school libraries and should be removed.

During a March 2026 Houston ISD school board meeting, Wallace addressed the board during public comment and said she would be reading from a book currently available to students in the district.

Wallace began reading verbatim from “A Court of Silver Flames,” a Sarah J. Maas fantasy romance novel filled with sexually explicit content. Trustees issued multiple warnings as she continued reading the book.

Trustees Remove Wallace From Meeting

After Wallace continued reading despite warnings from trustees, three police officers escorted her from the meeting.

“[Trustee Angela Lemond Flowers] said you can’t read anything inappropriate,” Wallace told the Daily Signal.

During the exchange, which was posted on X, Trustee Angela Lemond Flowers can be heard telling Wallace that she was “not allowed to read things that are not appropriate.”

Wallace responded, “Then why are they in your schools?”

What’s Inside the Book

“A Court of Silver Flames” is described as an adult fantasy romance novel and is the fifth book in the “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series. The book is widely known for being significantly more sexually explicit and descriptive than previous installments in the series.

In excerpts from the book that Wallace shared with the Daily Signal, one passage contains a highly explicit sexual scene with detailed descriptions of physical intimacy.

The book also contains violence, descriptions of battle gore, and explorations of depression, self-loathing, and past abuse.

‘It Had To Be Done’: Wallace Sues Houston ISD

After the incident, Wallace said multiple attorneys told her she had grounds to sue Houston ISD, the largest school district in Texas. She said they also warned that failing to challenge the district’s actions could encourage other school districts to take similar action.

Wallace was initially hesitant to file a lawsuit, but said she “finally was convinced by people who know more than I do that it had to be done because of the implications if it’s allowed to stand.”

“I was not being disruptive,” Wallace added.

Wallace, with her attorneys Martin K. Etwop and Jonathan K. Hullihan of Remnant Law, filed a lawsuit against Houston ISD in April alleging violations of her First Amendment rights. The lawsuit, shared with the Daily Signal, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division.

Lawsuit Centers on First Amendment Rights

Wallace’s lawsuit alleges that Houston ISD violated her First Amendment rights by stopping her from speaking and removing her from the meeting.

“This was textbook viewpoint discrimination: HISD silenced Ms. Wallace precisely because she demonstrated the hypocrisy of its own policies, proving that if the content was too explicit for adults, it was too explicit for children. Such conduct is ‘an egregious form’ of content regulation that the First Amendment almost never tolerates,” the lawsuit states.

After Wallace filed suit, Houston ISD moved to dismiss the case, arguing that she relies on the wrong First Amendment framework.

“The public-comment portion of a school board meeting is undeniably a limited public forum. It is well established that in such forums, governmental bodies may adopt reasonable, viewpoint-neutral rules governing participation and may reserve the forum for its intended purposes,” reads the district’s motion obtained by the Daily Signal.

“Under her own allegations—as well as the plain record of the meeting that Plaintiff incorporates into her claims—this case does not concern a general prohibition on speech content, but instead only the presiding officer’s administration of a well-established, content-neutral guideline on limited public forum presentations during a single HISD board meeting,” the motion adds.

Wallace told the Daily Signal the district’s argument demonstrates its hypocrisy.

“They state in there [the motion to dismiss] that they had to remove me because I was reading sexually and inappropriate content, and they wanted to protect the children,” Wallace said.

“First of all, there were no children in the school board meeting—I did make an announcement before I started speaking,” Wallace continued, “but their whole position is that they had to remove me because I was reading sexually explicit content and they needed to protect the children.”

“My reply to that is, ‘Wow, you want to protect the children at the school board meetings of HISD, but not in the campus libraries of HISD?” she added.

Wallace Believes Recent Supreme Court Ruling Helps Her Case

Just one month before Wallace filed suit, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Chiles v. Salazar, which stated that a person may not be removed simply because their speech makes you uncomfortable.

Wallace said the ruling strengthened her position.

“That was so important,” Wallace said of the court’s decision. “When I’m reading books that are highly inappropriate, they’re very shocked, and then they don’t know what to do.”

Wallace also told the Daily Signal she has found more than 2,100 books she believes to be inappropriate in libraries across Texas school districts. She claims that Houston ISD carries nearly all of those books.

Texas Law Restricts Sexually Explicit School Library Material

Gov. Greg Abbott’s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, told the Daily Signal that Abbott expects school districts to follow state law.

“Sexually explicit material has no place in Texas public school libraries. Governor Abbott was proud to sign laws that require its removal,” Mahaleris said. “The Governor expects every school district to follow state law.”

In 2023, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 900, also known as the READER Act. The law established standards for school library collection development and created requirements concerning sexually explicit and sexually relevant library materials. It also requires schools to recognize parents as the primary decision-makers regarding a student’s access to library materials and encourages catalog transparency.

Abbott signed the legislation in June 2023, and it took effect Sept. 1, 2023.

“Parents deserve to know what books are in school libraries. I’m signing a law that gets inappropriate or vulgar materials out of our schools,” Abbott said during the signing.

Education Advocates Weigh In

Education advocates also weighed in on Wallace’s lawsuit.

Corey DeAngelis, a research fellow for the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Signal that what happened to Wallace was outrageous but predictable.

“Houston ISD removed a parent from a public meeting for reading aloud from a sexually explicit book that the district itself has placed in school libraries including those accessible to elementary, middle, and high school students,” DeAngelis said. “The school board doesn’t want the public to hear the material they’re giving kids. That tells you everything you need to know about their priorities.”

DeAngelis said one solution is to hold school board members accountable through elections.

“States should require school board elections to be held on the same day as the general election. Special-interest groups—especially the teachers unions—dominate low-turnout, off-cycle elections. Aligning them with higher-turnout general elections gives parents a much better chance of winning,” he said.

Mandy Drogin, senior fellow for the Government Reform & Oversight Coalition at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, also commented on the lawsuit.

“This is the M.O. of the education cartel [is] to shut down any dissent that does not go along with their radical progressive ideology, which includes desensitizing children to highly pornographic, explicit content,” said Drogin. “They are intentionally putting it in libraries.”

Drogin said there should be consequences for school leaders who allow such books to remain in libraries.

“The reality is, until we see severe consequences for putting this smut into our kids’ schools and classrooms, they’re going to keep doing it,” Drogin said. “There should probably be a full audit of all of the books that are in our libraries being put forth to our kids, and it all needs to be removed.”

“If it’s not removed, there should be consequences for the adults that are allowing it to be in there,” she added.

Wallace’s case is scheduled for trial Sept. 13, 2027, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division.

Houston ISD did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently announced her decision to freeze her eggs, she said she was “empowered.”

“This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” the 36-year-old Democrat said in a social media video. “If people want to make assumptions about my decision, let them make those assumptions. I feel empowered to make this choice.”

But Ocasio-Cortez’s rah-rah rhetoric can’t disguise the bleak reality of why some women freeze their eggs.

Ocasio-Cortez, who has been engaged since 2022, was mum about any personal reasons or timing factors related to her decision. (The New York congresswoman did suggest in a TV interview Sunday she was open to running for the presidency or Senate, which could certainly affect her workload.)

But according to one researcher, clear patterns emerge when you look at why women decide to freeze their eggs. And no, it’s not because they are all trying to “girl boss” their way to the corner office and don’t want to risk the distraction of babies.

Yale University Professor Marcia Inhorn, who focuses on anthropology and international affairs, conducted a study of 114 women who chose to freeze their eggs for her 2023 book, “Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs.”

Of those 114 women, exactly one did it “specifically for career-planning purposes,” writes Inhorn.

Instead, “[d]espair, or the loss and absence of hope, is a running theme in many women’s egg freezing stories.” Women who choose to freeze their eggs are largely not doing it because their first choice is to have kids later in life.

Inhorn writes that “heterosexual relationship troubles” are the driving force behind egg freezing, and that the “vast majority of women I interviewed found themselves in their late thirties without partners.”

“Egg freezing was not about their careers,” she writes. “It was about being single or in very unstable relationships with men who were unwilling to commit to them.”

Talk about the opposite of a fairy tale.

Take the story of Ruth, who told her boyfriend, “If you propose, this means you’re having children. If you decide you don’t want to have kids, then you need to break up with me.” The boyfriend proposed. They got married. They purchased a house.

And then he told her he had changed his mind: He “thinks he won’t enjoy it and then he’ll be depressed. And he’s fearful of, like, racing up his depression …”

Ruth ultimately did three cycles of egg freezing, Inhorn reports in “Motherhood on Ice.”

“Ruth admitted to weeping on the ultrasound table, telling the technician, ‘I should be having sex with my husband, having a baby. And I’m here freezing my eggs,’” writes Inhorn.

Another woman, Lily, was in a relationship with one man, Jack, for almost a decade, starting when she was 31. During the next five years, Lily talks to Jack about wanting children. “But Jack always replied that he was ‘not ready,’” Inhorn writes.

When Lily was 36, she once again brought up the topic to Jack. “He was like, ‘I really want it. I see myself with kids, playing ball … in theory, when I close my eyes, it’s in the picture, but in reality, I’m totally paralyzed with fear.’” At 38, Lily stopped taking birth control, and Jack responded by refusing to have sex with her for 14 months. They broke up.

Ultimately, Lily froze 16 eggs. In her mid-40s, she tried to get pregnant, using those eggs and even using Jack’s sperm (he agreed but wouldn’t commit to parenting the children).

She never became pregnant.

She’s not alone in that outcome, either.

In fact, many women who freeze their eggs either don’t succeed in having a viable pregnancy from their eggs or they never pursue motherhood further. A 2022 New York University Langone study found that only 39% of women aged 27 to 44 who froze their eggs had a child.

Interestingly, many women don’t even try, despite undergoing the grueling process of egg harvesting. Only 5.7% of women who froze their eggs tried to use them in the five to seven years following the procedure, according to a 2025 University of California, Los Angeles study.

Clearly there’s a problem. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 39% of women wanted two children, and 37% wanted three or more children. Yet right now the average birth rate is 1.6 children per woman in the United States.

And while only 3% of women want no children, about 15% of women aged 45 to 50 have never had a child.

Obviously, many women want kids, but life isn’t working out as they hoped it would. Rather than focusing on egg freezing, we’d be better served by creating a culture that encourages men to become great husbands and dads and embrace raising families.

Peak woke revealed a totalitarian mindset in America that raged out of control for a few years, until unpopularity, a little courage from the minority who stood against it, and the election of President Donald Trump in 2024 turned the tide against it.

But leftists—especially ones running for office—are determined to rewrite history (they’re used to doing that) to gaslight the American people into believing that its excesses were merely rhetoric and that they are totally more reasonable now.

A prime example of that is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who appeared on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday to talk about, among other things, the rise of socialists in American politics.

If it wasn’t clear already, Ocasio-Cortez seems to be setting the table for a presidential run in 2028 or beyond. On that White House question, she chose to remain predictably noncommittal, saying, “I haven’t ruled out the possibility.”

So, unfortunately, we are likely to hear a lot more from her in the coming years, especially considering the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Ocasio-Cortez was asked about socialist politicians, like Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong, who’ve endorsed things like defunding the police, among other crackpot ideas that were widely popular among Democrats just a few years ago.

The New York congresswoman tried to wave away what happened during the Great Awokening as no big deal, just lefties getting a little frisky and excited, that’s all.

“I have a local city councilman that has this saying: Woke 1 was crazy,” she said to host Jon Karl as she wore a big smile and laughed. “ … I think that during, especially during COVID, I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.”

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Ocasio-Cortez appears to be angling to fill the lane of the nationally electable socialist. But she remains an active member of the New York Chapter of the DSA. It’s worth noting that the DSA platform includes things like getting rid of the Senate, liquidating private property, and abolishing prisons.

Those positions that they just recently endorsed still seem unacceptably nuts to me.

The problem with peak woke, which Ocasio-Cortez eagerly took part in, wasn’t just over-the-top rhetoric.

No, their worst ideas were being forced on the country by our most elite institutions, not just a few isolated crackpots.

And they were leading us straight to perdition.

I know it gets forgotten and whitewashed now, but they were doing things like rationing medicine based on race.

The “better place” we got to with the “defund the police” movement was a historic, national crime wave.

And in places where they felt most powerful, they tried to ruin the lives of anyone who stood in their way. That included people who were generally on the left but didn’t buy all the conclusions of the most fervent wokesters.

For just one small example in a sea of examples, data scientist David Shor was fired from the left-leaning consulting firm Civis Analytics merely for saying that violent protests could be counterproductive and encourage political backlash.

Wildly popular and quite liberal “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling has been canceled for refusing to say that a man can become a woman. She has the great advantage of wealth, but many others weren’t so fortunate.

Some people with a lot less power than Rowling were fired for refusing to use a transgender person’s preferred pronouns.

Countless academics were hounded, threatened, and occasionally fired for merely saying that DEI policies were bad or excessive.

Woke 1, as Ocasio-Cortez called it, wasn’t just ideological excess or people getting a little “crazy,” it was an existential threat to free societies, a moment that got cut just short of the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France.

It was stopped because Democrats lost power and the incoming Trump administration has worked hard to undo it.

Given those woke excesses, it’s a little rich for Ocasio-Cortez—or any left-wing politician pretending to suddenly be a sensible moderate—to wave away the comments they made during that era as no big deal.

It’s on them to explain what drove them to embrace cuckoo policies like defunding the police.

Have they abandoned the idea that biological sex can be changed? If so, I see little evidence of that other than occasional “reasonable” sounding statements that don’t actually repudiate the notion.

The truth is they haven’t changed at all.

Sure, they focus more on economic leveling these days, but the Democrat activist class remains as culturally woke as ever, and they will never accept what they see as a reversal of the progressive wheel turning of history that they feel was being accomplished in recent years.

That’s something that even CNN analyst Fareed Zakaria recently recognized.

“When Democrats come under pressure, they find it much easier to move left on economics than toward the center on culture,” he said. “If they speak plainly and say that the border must be controlled, repeat offenders punished, and standards of merit defended, or that biological sex matters, they risk revolts from activists, advocacy groups and highly educated staffers. So instead, Democrats offer a larger subsidy, a new benefit or a fiercer attack on billionaires while leaving untouched the cultural attitudes that alienate many voters.”

That’s right.

And the moment they get power as they had under President Joe Biden, what do you think their priority will be?

We will go right back to where we were before, except this time the Left might be even more paranoid about the possibility of losing power. It’s a chilling thought. Ocasio-Cortez’s giggles and smiles may fool some, but it’s likely woke 2 will be just like woke 1. This time with more ruthless communism.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said in private text messages with other federal health officials that the COVID-19 vaccine could “theoretically” pose a risk of miscarriage for pregnant women after the second dose.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases noted that because “many people have a cytokine storm and fever after the second dose” of the vaccine, “this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.” The January 2021 text thread took place during the early weeks of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

A cytokine storm occurs when the body releases too many small proteins called cytokines into the blood too fast, which causes extreme swelling and can lead to organ failure and death, according to the National Institutes of Health.

However, Fauci and other top health officials in the Biden administration said afterward that pregnant women should get the vaccine.

In August 2021, Fauci said, “Tens and tens, and tens of thousands of women who have been followed by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], who have been vaccinated when they were pregnant, there’s no indication whatsoever that there’s any increase of any adverse issues in a pregnant woman who was vaccinated compared to a pregnant woman who wasn’t vaccinated … it’s pretty clear that pregnant women should get vaccinated.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, as well as the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, obtained 34,000 text messages and 522 voicemails from Fauci’s phone as part of their investigation into his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The panels published the first batch of text messages on Monday.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress last week and referred the citation to the Justice Department after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times before the committee on July 29.

The committees released the text chain between Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, dated Jan. 25-26, 2021. The topic was pregnant women and the COVID-19 vaccine.

Murthy first asked on Jan. 25, 2021, “For pregnant women considering getting a vaccine, are you aware of any data or theoretical reason why vaccinating early vs. late in the pregnancy would be preferred? I’ve been telling pregnant women there hasn’t been any evidence of concerning adverse outcomes in the trials.”

Walensky replied, “My understanding is that this is all data free.”

At 4:56 p.m. that day, Fauci replied, “There are no data or theoretical reason to believe that vaccinating early vs. late in pregnancy would be preferred.”

He continued, saying there is anxiety and a misperception about the safety of mRNA, and said, “When the misperception gets extended to an early developing fetus, the anxiety heightens.”

However, at 6:45 p.m., he sent another text expressing more concern.

“I asked around a bit and another issue came up that you need to be aware of,” Fauci said. “Since many people have a cytokine storm and fever after the second dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

Murthy responded on Jan. 26, saying, “Did you see this announcement from WHO [World Health Organization] saying they advise against pregnant women taking the Moderna [vaccine because] of lack of data?”

Fauci replied, “In any vaccine in which the data are lacking in pregnant women, one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits.” He said that 10,000 women had been vaccinated and that “no issues have arisen.”

Later that year, public health officials recommended that pregnant women be vaccinated against COVID-19.

On Sept. 29, 2021, Walensky said, “CDC strongly recommends COVID-19 vaccination either before or during pregnancy because the benefits of vaccination outweigh known or potential risks.”

On Feb. 1, 2022, Murthy said, “The data points show that the vaccines are safe during these various stages before and during pregnancy.”

During an Oval Office press gaggle Monday, a reporter asked President Donald Trump about the text messages.

“Well, the Biden administration was a disaster in every way. That would be just one way,” Trump responded Monday. “They have been a disaster in every single one. It’s unimaginable what they did, and I forget about weaponization, forget even about things as important as what you say, the open borders, the men in women’s sports, it’s just been horrible, this disaster, the highest inflation in history. And we’re doing a great job.”

In the 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” an Iowa corn farmer named Ray heeds an unseen voice telling him “If you build it, they will come,” and builds a baseball stadium. Ray lived happily ever after in this fantasy sports movie, but heeding this advice has not worked out for taxpayers financing dubious school projects.

American school districts have been spending record amounts of money building and rebuilding school buildings despite falling enrollment.

During the 2025-26 fiscal year, total K-12 school construction and renovation spending in the United States reached $89.2 billion—a record level. This figure includes new school construction ($34.8 billion), major renovation and modernization ($38.6 billion), and additions and expansions ($15.8 billion). The number was up from $76.3 billion nationwide in 2019.

Districts experiencing rapid student enrollment growth can certainly require more building space. School district enrollment, however, dropped by approximately 2 million students between 2019 and 2025. Many school districts continue to spend large sums on school buildings despite declining enrollment.

The best example of this folly comes not from the Midwest but rather from the desert southwest, where Scottsdale Unified School District in Arizona has decided to double down on already immense facility spending. Scottsdale Unified represents a prime example of a “Field of Dreams” approach to construction gone wrong.

The Arizona auditor general published a performance audit of the Scottsdale Unified School District in 2014, noting an excess of school building capacity:

In fiscal year 2012, Scottsdale USD had total school building capacity of about 38,000 students but only had about 25,000 students enrolled, or in other terms, the District was using about 66 percent of its building capacity. Maintaining more building space is costly to the District because the majority of its funding is based on its number of students, not the amount of square footage it maintains.

Despite an approximate 66% utilization rate in 2012, Scottsdale Unified passed a $229,000,000 bond issue to construct new space in 2016. Part of that bond issue involved tearing down and rebuilding Scottsdale Unified’s Pima Elementary School, among others.

After tearing the previous Pima Elementary to the ground, Scottsdale Unified spent $20,419,424 to build a new Pima Elementary with design capacity of 700 students. Pima Elementary had only 452 students enrolled the year before reconstruction. The school reopened with 492 out of 700 spaces filled, but the number of students has continued to decline afterwards, down to 296 in the 2025-26 school year. In 2026, Scottsdale Unified announced that they were closing Pima Elementary.

Scottsdale Unified taxpayers will continue to pay off the debt for the new but closed Pima Elementary until 2036. Pima Elementary was the first reconstructed campus to close, but it may not be the last.

Not to be outdone by the folly of previous boards, the Scottsdale Unified School District will be seeking an additional $375,000,000 bond in 2026, despite having student enrollment fall to 19,472 students in 2025-26.

By 2025-26, Scottsdale Unified had dropped to almost 50% of their 2012 enrollment capacity, according to the Arizona auditor general. Nevertheless, district officials have decided to keep building up debt and construction projects at a pace that would make an Egyptian pharaoh blush.

Scottsdale Unified is far from alone in promoting facility folly. Unfortunately, powerful special interests lobby in favor of new construction and help finance campaigns. In addition, communities often oppose closing underenrolled district campuses. Over time, these two forces can accumulate a great deal of vacant and underutilized space.

In 2025, the Commonsense Institute of Arizona examined data from the Arizona School Facilities Board and estimated that the Arizona district system has physical capacity to serve almost 1.3 million students—despite only having 850,000 students enrolled. The extra 450,000 spaces could accommodate a group of students to equal the combined enrollment of the Vermont, Wyoming, the District of Columbia, and North Dakota public school systems.

Despite a statewide decline in district enrollment of 47,500 students after 2019, Arizona school districts spent $8.9 billion on capital spending. Six billion of that resulted in 499 new district buildings despite the statewide decline in enrollment. 

Arizona lawmakers need to take action by passing a minimum enrollment capacity standard for school districts to saddle their taxpayers with further debt. As for the existing glut, taxpayers paid for these buildings to educate students, and there is a policy change that would allow them to do just that.

Lawmakers should pass a co-location statute. Co-location is practiced in states ranging from California and New York to Georgia and Florida. Under these practices, charter schools can make use of vacant and underutilized facilities. These policies allow charters to spend less on facilities and to pay their teachers more. Unlike previous co-location policies, the next generation of statutes should allow district magnet schools, private schools, and micro-schools to participate.

Pima Elementary could live again as the host to multiple high-demand small schools. Those schools could help retire the multi-million-dollar debt associated with the district’s inexplicable decision to tear the previous underenrolled school down.

If Scottsdale Unified cannot produce a school that Arizona parents demand, they should be required to make room for those who can.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL — A new political action committee led by a Republican, Hispanic former Congresswoman aims to influence key House and Senate races in border states by rallying Hispanic-Americans.

The American Dream PAC, led by former Texas Rep. Mayra Flores, is looking to capitalize off of President Donald Trump’s strong performance with Hispanic-Americans in 2024 by engaging with the community on faith, family, and opposition to socialism. If successful, the PAC could help Republicans maintain control of both chambers. The new group will canvas Hispanic-American voters through television and radio ads, mailers, campaign rallies, and speaking engagements.

“I love this country too much to sit on the sidelines,” Flores told the Daily Signal. “We need to get involved and push back against the left’s lies, especially on immigration.”

The PAC will also “combat the misinformation and hate” pushed by the left in Hispanic-majority communities, which Flores—who was awarded a 92% score by Heritage Action during her time in office—said is a deliberate plan from the left to manufacture deportation fears for law-abiding American citizens.

Preserving the Hispanic-Conservative Alliance

Hispanic-American voters have drifted rightward during the Trump era.

In 2024, after campaigning on an anti-socialist platform, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate in 36 years to win Miami-Dade County, Florida, a Hispanic-majority county and the seventh most populous county in the country. Nationwide, he won about 55% of the Hispanic male vote, the highest share ever for a Republican presidential candidate.

“The Hispanic vote came out strong for President Trump,” Flores said. “I told him we were going to deliver the largest Hispanic vote ever won by a Republican presidential candidate, and we delivered. We can’t give up on that.”

In 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis became the first Republican gubernatorial candidate in 20 years to win the once-Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County with 59% of the vote.

However, Flores argued that in order for Hispanic-American voters to continue delivering conservative victories, the Hispanic community needs to hear the message that the GOP is the “party that most aligns with our values.”

“The Democrat Party is against everything we stand for. We’re all about faith, family values, and hard work. We are patriots, we love this country, and our values align with the Republican Party,” Flores, explaining her motivation for wanting to start the PAC, said.

“In order for Republicans to win, they have to be in these districts, they have to have the in-person meetings, they have to communicate with the voters,” she continued. “We have an obligation to make sure the Hispanic vote continues shifting towards the Republican Party.”

The Battlegrounds

Key congressional races targeted by the PAC include Hispanic majority districts Trump overwhelmingly won in 2024. Flores claims these districts have become hotbeds of disinformation and deception.

The PAC will be especially focused on Flores’ home state of Texas. The American Dream PAC will get involved in House races for Districts 34, 15, and 28, as well as the Texas Senate race.

Polls suggest the Senate race between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico is a tight race. A recent survey showed Talarico with a clear shot at flipping the Senate seat. But Flores believes the race is close because voters have not heard enough about Talarico’s “radical agenda.”

“Last week, I went to a Hispanic-owned business the other day, for maybe 15 minutes, a business where Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico held a campaign event, and talked to the people there,” Flores continued. “In just a matter of minutes, they were telling me that they didn’t know Talarico embraces such a radical agenda and they quickly stopped supporting him.”

A recent poll from the League of American Workers found that Hispanics approve, by an 11-point margin, of removing illegal migrants who refuse the Trump administration’s generous incentives for self-deportation, including paid trips home and the ability to reapply later for legal status. In addition, Hispanics support full cooperation between local police and federal immigration authorities by a margin of 20 points.

Another race targeted by the PAC is Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, a Hispanic-majority district where Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz., flipped the seat in 2022 by fewer than 300 votes.

Recent polls, however, show that the Democratic candidate for Arizona’s 6th Congressional District, JoAnna Mendoza, has a clear shot at flipping the seat.

Flores believes that Democrats could win these border state districts if Republicans fail to engage Hispanic voters sympathetic to critical conservative causes.

Some of the biggest corporations in our cities pay no income taxes. Often, they also pay no property taxes and get other tax breaks. They all receive massive taxpayer-funded subsidies and other benefits. These are supposedly “nonprofit” hospitals, and they get these benefits based on their claim to be charitable institutions. But do they really put patients first?

My organization spent the last few months researching some of the largest tax-exempt hospital systems.

Our new Nonprofit Hospital Accountability Report shows strange priorities, at best. Executives receive massive salaries and lavish perks while laying off frontline staff. Ignoring healthcare deserts nearby, they expand overseas. And while claiming to be charities, many sue patients for medical debt.

At the same time, many smaller medical practices operate as regular businesses.

They actually pay income and property taxes, and often receive few or even no subsidies. This is one reason why local doctors’ offices get bought up and consolidated into giant hospital conglomerates.

Here in the United States, we spend nearly twice what other similar nations spend per person on healthcare. Yet we get similar results. And the big hospitals lobby constantly for more money from taxpayers. That cannot be the answer.

In fact, the answer is more accountability.

Tax-exempt status is not an entitlement. It is a privilege—one that forces other taxpayers to pay more. That, and all the other benefits showered on these giant hospitals, are based on the idea that they make sacrifices for the public good. If they are not making those sacrifices, they should be called out and face consequences, including the loss of their tax exemptions.

Rush University Medical Center in Illinois offers a case study that should concern every taxpayer.

Since 2020, Rush has received nearly $75 million in state funding, plus other significant tax advantages. That support is justified only if it translates into better care for patients and service to its surrounding communities.

In early 2024, Rush laid off employees citing “financial struggles,” even as it continued to provide multimillion-dollar compensation packages to top executives. Its CEO received more than $3.6 million in pay, along with additional benefits like a personal housing allowance and memberships at exclusive social clubs. 

The outlandish spending does not stop there.

This nonprofit had more than $167.8 million in overseas investments and relationships in the same year while simultaneously expanding high-profile partnerships with professional sports franchises like the Chicago White Sox.

At the same time, Rush benefitted from more than $194 million in federal awards through dozens of government programs.

Rush is just one example; another is the New York-Presbyterian Hospital System.

This tax-exempt hospital system was part of a $750 million settlement covering hundreds of sexual abuse claims by female patients who were molested during medical treatments. Simultaneously, it boosted the CEO’s annual compensation from $8.9 million to more than $23 million.

During all this, the hospital also reportedly laid off approximately 1,000 employees due to “financial challenges.” And how much did New York-Presbyterian spend on charity? During the years we examined, the corporation directed only 0.7% to 1% of revenue to charity care. 

Our report identifies a pattern at nonprofit hospitals across the country.

Many of these tax-exempt corporations continue to benefit from public support and government programs while spending little on charity care and operating in ways that look like any other big business. 

Any rampant misuse of taxpayer dollars should concern every public official and all Americans.

Taxpayer-supported benefits are meant to support the public good, not to subsidize massive corporations simply because they run a hospital.

Many nonprofit hospitals provide essential services to vulnerable populations, but our current system relies too much on assumptions and too little on oversight. 

With billions in taxpayer dollars at stake, not to mention our health, Americans should know that public funding is going to patient care and not just funding lavish compensation packages and luxury perks while frontline healthcare workers lose their jobs.

Federal and state officials should take a closer look. Those with oversight responsibilities need to ask whether nonprofit hospital systems like Rush and New York-Presbyterian are fulfilling their charitable missions, appropriately using government benefits, and upholding the public trust that is the basis of their privileged status.

The American people deserve nonprofit hospitals that respect taxpayers and put patients first.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Galveston County voters have filed an emergency petition for a writ of mandamus asking the Texas Supreme Court to block the county from implementing new precinct maps for the November election.

In June, the Galveston County Commissioners Court adopted a 2026 map that established new precinct boundaries for county commissioners, justices of the peace, and constables.

Dereck Rose, a Galveston County resident who was elected as the County’s Precinct 3 constable in 2024, and registered voters Wilma Green and Diane Merchant, filed the emergency petition. They argue that the commissioners provided only a justification based on a “desire” to divide the boundaries and “determined that the interests of the people of the county are best served by changing the existing Commissioners, Constables, and Justices of the Peace Precinct Boundaries.”

The petitioners also argue that the 2026 map violates equal protection by denying voters the opportunity to vote in, or declare their candidacy for, the primary election for offices that will be on the November ballot, as well as that the map violates the Texas Constitution and Texas Election Code.

According to Campaign Legal Center and UCLA Voting Rights Project, which represent the petitioners, the groups argued in federal court that Galveston County’s previous map “intentionally discriminated against Black and Latino voters.” They say the 2026 one is similar to the 2021 map they challenged.

The latest legal challenge follows the 2022 Pettaway lawsuit, which challenged Galveston County’s 2021 redistricting map and sought to redraw four county commissioners’ precincts.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Brown, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, ruled in 2023 that the 2021 map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black and Latino Voters. 

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed that ruling in 2024, holding that Section 2 does not authorize separate minority groups to combine their populations for a vote-dilution claim. The 5th Circuit remanded the case to the district court for further consideration of the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims, including their claims of intentional discrimination and racial gerrymandering.

One of the claims remanded to the district was based on the 15th Amendment, and alleges intentional discrimination.

In 2026, the Commissioners Court adopted a new map combining the precinct boundaries for county commissioners, justices of the peace, and constables.

Joseph Nixon, an attorney representing Galveston County, told The Daily Signal that the new map effectively mooted the remaining claims in the Petteway case.

Nixon said the petitioners’ claims that the county lacked authority to redraw its precinct boundaries and that the map was racially motivated are incorrect.

“There’s no evidence to support that horrible allegation,” Nixon said. “The County did it for partisan reasons and said so.”

Nixon also said the plaintiffs in the federal case argued and presented evidence that “race and politics were inextricably intertwined,” meaning there was no distinction between racial voting patterns and partisan voting patterns.

“This is a last-ditch effort to try to keep from losing in federal court,” Nixon told the Daily Signal. “This is a desperate ploy.”

The Texas Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the emergency petition. Galveston County’s response is due Monday, Aug. 10.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the latest edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: But there were leaks from the government that there was a depletion of our weaponry to fight Iran with. And then, if you have anything, Trump is talking about there’s a new deal with Iran in the works. I know your audience is thinking, yeah, that’s not gonna pan out. But if you have anything on that, and then also tales of JD [Vance] and Bibi Netanyahu not getting along.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, to go first very quickly, people have been leaking that there are not enough Patriot missiles, for example, or Harpoon missiles, older ones, Tomahawk missiles. We’ve heard there are not enough bunker busters. I don’t know if any of this is true, but it’s been leaking.

And the problem, why Trump is so angry, is we have enough, we have about 40% or 50% likely of our arsenal, which is too low. This has been going on for a long time. Obama cut the defense budget, Biden did, and we don’t have enough stuff. But the problem that makes people angry is we have enough to handle Iran. We don’t have enough to handle Iran, give Ukraine enough to protect Kyiv, and then deter China from attacking Taiwan. So the more you say that and leak it, the more likely China might believe it and want to try.

While we’re engaged with Ukraine and Iran, they might want to try to see if they could go into Taiwan, and we wouldn’t have enough missiles. That’s the worry.

The second thing about Trump and the Iran war, we’ve had five or six of these where he says, the negotiations are going great. And then they break down, and then he hits them once or twice, and then they beg him, beg him, beg him to get back, and then everything’s close to an agreement. But the Iranians don’t tell the truth, and then he gets frustrated. 

And the problem with this is that on Feb. 28, you know, we had 250 days before the midterms. So, after 38 days of kinetic operations, we stopped. We stopped because about 80%, 90% of everything they had was destroyed. But we didn’t know that they had these little mosquito boats hidden everywhere, and we didn’t know to what degree they had drones and missiles hidden. And they had a lot.

So when we kept saying we’re destroying 90% of their air capacity as far as missiles and drones, we didn’t know what the denominator was. We didn’t know 90% of what. 10,000? 20,000? It could be a lot, 10%. And so they started threatening the Gulf.

At that point, the Gulf freaked out. And they had wanted us to go in there and eliminate Iran. But now that they got hit, they didn’t want to commit with their 600 aircraft and join us because they thought we wouldn’t take them out completely. So then people came to Trump, I guess, this week and said, you’re out of time. We’re only 90 days. If you’re going to solve this, you can’t keep saying this because–so, last week they dreamed up, we’re just going to unload the greatest military campaign in the air since World War II. And they were. And then that panicked Iran. 

And they say now they’re going to open the Strait of Hormuz. I don’t think you can trust them. But the point is they got the message that now this was the last chance. So if they break this, and I think they will, Trump will have no choice, if he is to have any credibility, unless he continues with that program. And your third part of the question?

Sami Winc: JD was at odds with Bibi. That was the tale. He was on Laura and he denied it, but—

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, that’s a complicated question because Trump came out today and said that he supports JD as his successor as the Republican nominee in 2028. The reason he did that was JD was starting to be associated with these negotiations and not the kinetic part under Hegseth. And the negotiations hadn’t worked.

And he had said we were dealing with the moderates. There are no moderates in Iran. There’s people who pose as moderates, but even if they wanted to be moderate, they’d be murdered. It’s run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Everybody knows that, and the theocracy.

And then he said that Israel couldn’t kill its way out. That sounds like Israel wanted to kill people. They didn’t want to kill people. If Hezbollah had stopped the missiles tomorrow, they wouldn’t have ever gone into Lebanon.

So there was an impression that, on the international stage, he wasn’t as experienced, let’s say, as Rubio, and Rubio’s stock was starting to come up. And if that continued, there might be a destructive race in 2028. So what Trump did was he said to JD, pretty much, I will back you, but you’ve got to stop the stuff about Netanyahu. So he had him meet Netanyahu, and there was supposedly–on Laura Ingraham’s interview, he denied there was a bad.

But the problem is this, that Tucker’s son worked for JD, and he, whether it’s fair or not, is associated with that wing of the MAGA movement, the Tucker Carlson, the Candace Owens, the Steve Bannon, the Joe Kent, is that his name? Yeah. All of those guys, and maybe Megyn Kelly, I don’t know. And Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie.

And the problem with that, if he is to be associated with them, they say some pretty crazy things about Israel and the Jews. And when Thomas Massie is at a loss, because of the decision that was made in Israel, you know. And so there’s a lot of—

And there’s two problems with that. Trump’s grandchildren are Jewish and his daughter has converted to Judaism. And more importantly, there’s a lot of powerful Jewish donors who are sick of the Democratic antisemitism. So the Republican Party is trying to attract them.

But already you see, not just among Jews, but among other people, are worried that JD seems to be singling out Israel for criticism that’s not applicable to other, more deserving targets.

So this week he’s been rehabilitated, sort of, as he got in with, he had a talk with Netanyahu. He got on Fox and said it went well. Trump endorsed him, and you didn’t hear him taking–he’s more now looking at corruption than trying to solve the negotiations. And we’ll see what happens.

Sami Winc: Yeah, we’ll see what happens.

Well, let’s turn to some of the things going on at the federal level of our government. Rand Paul has gotten the votes to refer Fauci for contempt, given that he took the Fifth 111 times. And my question is not so much on that as this precedent set, and I don’t know if it’s worse now than it has been in the past, of having a government official execute the laws terribly against the people or to the people, and then just being able to get away with it because, at the end of a president’s term, they pardon them. And that’s a very bothersome pattern or precedent. And I’m not sure which one.

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, there’s two things that presidents do. They give pardons, so they’re exempt from prosecution, and they give clemencies, so that if they’ve been sentenced, their sentence can be stopped, they can get out of prison, for example. And they do both. And it’s controversial who does more of one or the other. But if you put them both together, which you should, out of our last 47 presidents, the top 10 were Democrats. And the most was Joe Biden at about 4,500 total. That’s pardons and clemencies and other things related to that.

And then there’s FDR. Then there’s Woodrow Wilson. I think Trump now is three or four in six years. But Eisenhower gave a lot too, by the way. But out of that 10, I think eight are Democrats. And that’s important to remember because they keep saying that Trump is the all-time pardoner. I think it’s been widely abused.

Like nearly every other country on Earth, Saudi Arabia is facing massive electricity demand growth. One estimate projects that the kingdom’s power demand will grow at least 27% by 2030 from 2023 levels. Similarly, like many other countries, it is looking to secure nuclear energy to help meet that demand.

Saudi Arabia has never built a nuclear power plant. This presents two major challenges. First, it doesn’t have the industrial base to build or support a commercial nuclear industry. Second, Saudi Arabia is still developing the institutional structures necessary to oversee the industry, and that bureaucracy is still evolving. That means that it will need to rely on foreign help to both build reactors and to establish the necessary rules under which they operate, and there are only a few nations that have the experience and technological know-how to do both. Two such nations are Russia and China, and both are working hard to become Saudi Arabia’s nuclear partner.

That is a problem because whoever builds the first power plants in Saudi Arabia will heavily influence the rules under which the facilities are built and regulated as well as the standards, procedures, and operational norms that determine how the program is managed over time.

Regardless of rhetoric about safety and nonproliferation, Saudi Arabia’s partner will help define the culture in which the kingdom’s nuclear program evolves. That culture will determine the program’s long-term success, and neither Russia nor China would do as good a job instilling a culture that prioritizes safety and nonproliferation as the U.S. would.

That is why the United States needs to stop either nation from defining Saudi Arabia’s commercial nuclear future. The next step in doing so is implementing the U.S.-Saudi Arabia 123 Agreement, which would allow the U.S. and its agreement partner to engage in peaceful commercial nuclear trade under agreed safety and nonproliferation rules.

Unfortunately, too much of the response to news of the deal has been misleading.

For example, the initial media coverage reported the agreement as giving Saudi Arabia the right to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel. This is simply not true. The U.S. does not grant any country the “right” to enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel. As a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Saudi Arabia, like every other signatory, has the “inalienable right” to pursue the full spectrum of peaceful nuclear technologies so long as they are not used to pursue nuclear weapons. Of course there is debate over exactly what that means.

What there should not be debate about is that the 123 Agreement places strict moderations on those rights and provides maximum opportunity for the U.S. to apply leverage over how Saudi Arabia exercises them.

Indeed, section 123 of the Atomic Energy Act reads specifically that no material used or produced under the agreement “will be reprocessed, enriched, or otherwise altered without the prior approval of the United States.”

For all intents and purposes, once Saudi Arabia and the U.S. finalize the 123 agreement, the kingdom has agreed to not reprocess or enrich unless and until the U.S. agrees for them to do so. And that is within the context of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which exists solely to control nuclear proliferation. Both the NPT and 123 Agreement require inspections and multiple layers of safety and nonproliferation protocols.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped critics from claiming that the agreement isn’t good enough because it doesn’t meet the “Gold Standard” set by the 123 Agreement that the U.S. signed with the United Arab Emirates in 2009. That agreement is held up as the ideal because the UAE agreed to forgo its rights to enrich uranium or reprocess spent fuel at any future point.

The problem with insisting that the “Gold Standard” be applied to all 123 agreements is that it wrongly assumes that the same agreement is the right agreement for every situation. This misses the point of 123 agreements in the first place and the entire system of international peaceful nuclear trade, which is built to stop secret military nuclear programs.

123 agreements, even those not meeting the so-called “Gold Standard,” still require that U.S. supplied nuclear material, equipment, and technology be used only for peaceful purposes. Furthermore, the new agreement helps to reinforce that Saudi Arabia’s commercial nuclear trade will rely on trusted suppliers from the U.S. and its allies.

In reality, the 123 Agreement preserves American influence and can, it must be noted, be terminated if it is violated. This creates a powerful incentive for all parties to respect the agreement.

Further, demands to meet the “Gold Standard” result in a misunderstanding—as demonstrated by much of the commentary around the U.S.-Saudi deal—that absent the standard, a nation can just start enriching or reprocessing. That is simply not the case.

Thus, rather than worry so much about what documents a nation signs, policymakers would be better off focusing on the trustworthiness of our partners and the strength of our relationships while ensuring that the legal and policy frameworks that govern the nations’ interactions promote U.S. interests and transparency. In other words, trust but verify.

Recognizing that the deal has not been made public and that important details could certainly impact any conclusion, the U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal seems to do exactly that by keeping the U.S. highly engaged with Saudi Arabia as the latter pursues commercial nuclear technology. Absent a 123 Agreement, Saudi Arabia would most definitely turn to Russia or China to provide it commercial nuclear technology, and that absolutely would not put America first.

Saudi Arabia is going to build commercial nuclear reactors, and the best way to influence their efforts is to engage as closely as possible. That requires the efficient passage of the U.S.-Saudi 123 Agreement.