Conservative: Hating the White Working Class
The Democrats’ 2024 electoral failures have led them to seek candidates who can pose as “authentic white working men,” smirks Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness. “Not content merely to recycle” or astroturf “familiar, anemic candidates,” they’re “seeking out brand new faces” like “Texas state legislator and Presbyterian minister James Talarico,” who smacks more of “left-wing liberation theology than Texas-style evangelicalism,” or Maine’s “rugged” Graham Platner, who “once described white rural Americans as ‘racists and stupid’ while claiming that he was a communist and calling for armed resistance.” In reality, “you do not need to look or act like the white working class to feel genuine affinity with it,” but “the new radical left-wing Democratic Party” remains “an elitist entity with a poorly disguised contempt for the white working class.”
James Talarico speaks onstage during “Raging Moderates” at the Vox Media Podcast Stage at SXSW on March 14, 2026 in Austin, Texas. Getty Images for Vox Media Elex desk: Chasing the ‘Normalcy’ Vote
“Americans keep voting for normal and getting something else,” notes The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker, as “partisans on both sides always think the moment is ripe for radicalism.” Voters in 2020 saw Joe Biden as an “unthreatening old man who had done essentially nothing in a 50-year political career,” then got “a president out of a radical Hollywood screenwriter’s fever dream.” In 2024, “Donald Trump was the more normal one.” But Trump’s “method of implementation” and affect are not normal. “No surprise then, that Mr. Trump’s approval rating is almost exactly where President Biden’s was.” It’s becoming increasingly clear that we “live in an age of radical politics, increasing polarization and a steady centrifugal momentum in both major parties.”
From the right: The ‘America First’ Left
The “simple explanation” for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s new “opposition to Iron Dome,” argues Commentary’s Seth Mandel, is that “she changed her mind” because “the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the leading Hamas-aligned hate groups in the country, told her to.” AOC says, “I believe the Israeli government is well able to fund the Iron Dome system.” Hmm, counters Mandel: When America sends aid for systems like that, the money ends up “spent on the U.S. economy and in fortifying American manufacturing” — and the Israelis share their new tech with us as well. Turns out “the America First left” is just as bad as “the America First right.”
Virginia beat: Why Spanberger’s Sinking
She won last November as a moderate, but Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has since turned her 15-point landslide victory “into a rating of 47 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval,” snarks The Federalist’s Breecan F. Thies, as “her moderate promises deteriorate into radical reality.” She’s letting the legislature push tax hikes and pro-criminal “justice reforms” and has blocked ICE from deporting illegal-migrant criminals. Plus, she’s embraced a Democratic gerrymander that “slinks multiple congressional districts” from the DC suburbs into the rest of the state, “effectively disenfranchising huge swaths of Republicans” and setting up rural voters “to have a congressman who will likely be a professional bureaucrat or lobbyist of the D.C. swamp variety.” No wonder she “has the worst approval rating of any Virginia governor” in the last three decades.
Woke watch: History Wins at President’s House
At the President’s House Site across from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, the National Park Service since 2010 “trained its sharpest criticism on George Washington,” and pinning “the blame for slavery” on “the men who led the American Revolution,” observes City Journal’s Jeffrey H. Anderson. After the NPS took down the poisonous signs in January, Philly wokes sued — stalling the installation of new signage that aims “to teach rather than condemn, to illuminate rather than lecture, and to educate Americans about a key historical site rather than use it to advance a woke agenda.” “How a country tells its story matters: a nation that denigrates its past and its heroes, rather than recognizing what it owes them, weakens its prospects for the future.”
