President Donald Trump’s longest-serving director of legislative affairs is departing this White House in the coming weeks, wrapping up nearly 600 wild, white-knuckle days of managing relations between the 47th president and the Congress.

While Trump’s massive 2024 electoral victory created powerful momentum in the early days of the administration, hard battles were quick to follow. The White House relied on knife’s-edge majorities in both chambers, as well as a number of senior senators in particular who carried no love for the president — and no sure loyalty to his priorities.

‘James has played a critical role in our many accomplishments with Congress.’

Just a week after Trump trounced Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris by 2,284,967 votes and 86 electoral points, former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gave a speech to the neoconservative think tank AEI in which he promised to devote his remaining days in office to frustrating the incoming Republican administration.

While less strident than their leader, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) promised similarly tough approaches. Both Collins and Murkowski backed former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for president, though her campaign only ever won Washington, D.C., and all three of them had voted to impeach at the end of Trump’s first term.

Despite formidable obstacles from the entire Democrat coalition and parts of the Grand Old Party itself, James Braid and his team were able to accomplish sweeping legislation on taxes, energy, the border, and spending in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; send $70 billion to immigration and border enforcement with the Secure America Act, even after the ICE-involved Minneapolis shootings scattered Senate support; create a regulatory framework for stablecoin cryptocurrency with the Genius Act; claw back $9 billion in overspending with a Rescissions Act; and crack down on deadly fentanyl trafficking and revenge porn with the Halt and Take It Down acts.

Even while the president, the Congress, and the parties all duked it out, the legislative affairs team was able to notch a number of major bipartisan victories. Early on, the Laken Riley Act won Democrat votes to create new tools for states to detain criminal illegal aliens and, possibly more importantly, give states legal remedies when the federal government refused its responsibility to protect states being swamped by illegal immigration, as many experienced during the Biden administration.

Braid and his team were also instrumental in helping to form coalitions and grease tracks for the 21st Century Road to Housing Act. The bill was perhaps Washington’s most populist reform of the past two years, working to lower housing prices and protect American families by taking on powerful, entrenched private equity interests that had been busily buying up entry-level homes in fast-growing markets, paying cash, and converting starter neighborhoods into permanent rental communities. While the vote ended up passing nearly unanimously, it was a battle to see it out of committees run by corporate-friendly Republicans and others unwilling to work with liberal Democrats.

Aside from legislative victories, Braid and his team successfully shepherded a number of deeply contentious nomination fights through an often hostile Senate, winning votes for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Chairman of the Federal Reserve Kevin Warsh, and Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Blanche’s confirmation was successful even after Trump targeted two of the Republican senators on the committee in their primary campaigns. While former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) withdrew their nominations, this administration has never lost a confirmation vote.

“James has played a critical role in our many accomplishments with Congress, including the ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL, beating the Democrats in two shutdown showdowns, passing the GENIUS Act, defeating a record number of War Powers resolutions, and in the confirmation of my Cabinet at the fastest rate in decades,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Thursday morning.

Braid has long worked on Capitol Hill and joined the campaign as the legislative director for JD Vance, then a fast-moving and combative freshman senator. “James Braid had one of the toughest jobs in the entire Administration as White House Legislative Director and delivered for President Trump at every turn,” Vance wrote Thursday morning. “He played a critical role in all of the administration’s achievements in Congress: largest tax cut ever, resources to carry out President Trump’s historic immigration agenda and finish the border wall, defeating two Democratic shutdowns, a landmark first crypto bill, the fastest confirmation of the cabinet in decades and much more.”

“I am profoundly grateful to President Trump and Vice President Vance for the opportunity to be a part of this extraordinary team and to serve in an administration that has worked with the Congress to deliver the largest tax relief in American history, the resources necessary to secure the border and build the wall across two reconciliation bills, the fastest confirmation of the Cabinet in 20 years, and defeating two Democratic shutdowns,” said Braid in a statement.

​Congress, Donald j trump, Housing, Immigration, Laken riley act, One big beautiful bill, Senate, White house, Politics 

President Donald Trump is right to challenge the leftist politicization of the Smithsonian, because what starts in a museum can ultimately end up as accepted fact or commonly held wisdom.

That is precisely what has happened in Canada, where national museums began packaging leftist ideas about history as diversity, equity and inclusion — whoops, that’s DEI, isn’t it?

There is now an active and increasingly organized campaign in Canada to criminalize ‘residential school denialism.’

What is truly bizarre is that those objecting to Trump’s intervention are accusing him of rewriting history! The Smithsonian has been doing just that for years. In Canada, as we shall see, it is even worse.

Trust fall

On July 24, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution,” following a months-long White House review of the Smithsonian and its National Museum of American History.

The review, released July 4 as “Saving America’s Story,” accused the museum of abandoning its traditional role as a repository of America’s shared inheritance in favor of using history as a tool for “social justice” and political transformation.

Trump’s order directs federal officials to use their authority to encourage changes at the museum and even calls for temporary signs outside it warning visitors about the findings of the White House review and directing them toward other sources of historical information.

The order follows Trump’s March 2025 directive instructing Vice President JD Vance, in his role as a Smithsonian regent, to work to “remove improper ideology” from the institution and prohibiting federal spending on exhibits that “degrade shared American values” or divide Americans by race.

The response has been predictable: Trump is interfering with history.

But what if history has already been interfered with? Canada offers a useful warning.

Dustbin of history

Canada’s flagship museums in Ottawa have long since followed the path the Smithsonian is now taking. During this writer’s lifetime, institutions created to celebrate and explain Canada’s history have changed so drastically in substance and political tone that it can feel as though the old museums were wiped from the urban landscape and replaced by counterfeit structures.

At least in Canada, the museums admit what they’re doing.

The Canadian Museum of History’s own equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility strategy says the institution will “allocate resources strategically to bridge gaps” in its collections and exhibitions in order to “ensure better representation of equity-deserving groups.”

This isn’t merely an effort to recover neglected history. It explicitly establishes representation and equity as principles determining what the museum collects and presents.

And it isn’t limited to Ottawa.

‘A profoundly evil space’

Calgary’s Glenbow Museum now greets visitors with the Blackfoot phrase Siksikaissksahkoyi Kiitaowahsinnooni — “Blackfoot land, your territory” — as part of a land acknowledgment that explains the museum’s location in terms of indigenous territorial claims and treaty responsibilities.

One of the most beautiful museums in Canada was undoubtedly the Royal BC Museum in Victoria. But there was just too much material telling the story of the European settlers who came to Canada’s West Coast and built a prosperous province out of wilderness.

As National Post columnist Tristin Hopper has noted, much of the old museum disappeared during its ideological transformation.

“The coal mine, sawmill, homestead and First Peoples gallery are all gone,” Hopper wrote of the diminished museum. “And for everything left, there are placards everywhere to lecture visitors that they are moving through a profoundly evil space.”

The museum itself has described its transformation in the language of “inclusivity,” community engagement and the “co-creation” of exhibits.

What is the larger consequence of rewriting a country’s history this way?

Arguably, it helps create a cultural elite and mainstream media prepared to accept almost any story that fits the established narrative of oppressor and oppressed. After all, isn’t that what the museums have been teaching them?

Grave distortion

Consider what happened at Kamloops.

In May 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir announced what the First Nation described as the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

The announcement exploded around the world. Canada’s flags were lowered. Politicians apologized. Catholic churches were vandalized and burned. Other First Nations began announcing possible graves at former residential school sites across Canada.

Lost in all the outrage was one crucial fact: No bodies had actually been exhumed. Anomalies that could be human remains had been discovered by ground-penetrating radar.

When GPR specialist Sarah Beaulieu publicly presented her findings two months later, the original number of 215 had already been reduced to 200 “targets of interest.” She described them as “probable burials,” while emphasizing that only forensic excavation could conclusively determine what was underground.

Five years later, no excavation has taken place at Kamloops and no human remains have been recovered there.

Unanswered questions

There are also legitimate questions about what the radar detected. Historical evidence shows that a septic field containing underground trenches was installed in the surveyed area in the 1920s, and critics of the Kamloops narrative have argued that some of those disturbances could account for the radar findings.

That theory has not been proven either. And that is precisely the point: without excavation, nobody can say with certainty what lies beneath those patches of ground.

The federal government initially provided Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc $7.9 million for field work, records searches, and securing the residential school grounds. That funding was subsequently increased, according to government records obtained by reporters, to more than $12 million.

Yet the central question that shook Canada in 2021 remains unanswered.

Nor have excavations elsewhere always vindicated the initial radar findings. At the former Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba, for example, investigators excavated 14 anomalies detected beneath a church. No human remains were found.

None of this means children did not die in Canada’s residential schools. They unquestionably did, often from disease in an era of appalling mortality, and there are known cemeteries associated with the schools.

It does mean that a soil anomaly is not a body, a possible burial is not a confirmed grave, and a claim repeated thousands of times by politicians and journalists does not become more scientifically certain through repetition.

RELATED: Canadian state media backs secret plot to trap and humiliate Indian mass-grave skeptics

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Skepticism or ‘denialism’?

Yet there is now an active and increasingly organized campaign in Canada to criminalize “residential school denialism.”

In July, the Assembly of First Nations passed an emergency resolution calling on the federal government to either amend its recently passed hate-crimes legislation or introduce a new law criminalizing the public “condoning, denial, justification, or minimization” of residential school abuses as a form of hate speech against First Nations. At a news conference during the assembly, Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Garrison Settee said Canada’s failure to criminalize residential school denialism amounted to a failure to protect First Nations from hate crimes.

The Senate had already rejected an attempt to add such a provision to the government’s Combating Hate Act, Bill C-9. The Justice Minister’s office said residential school denialism was a “serious and distinct issue” that warranted separate parliamentary study rather than inclusion in that legislation.

But the effort is hardly dead. NDP MP Leah Gazan’s private member’s bill, introduced last fall, would criminalize certain forms of residential school denialism and is still awaiting second reading in the House of Commons.

Settee also rejected demands that First Nations excavate suspected graves to establish that bodies are actually there, arguing that exhumation can violate indigenous cultural practices.

“I don’t think we should have to prove to anybody what happened to these people, because they are there. And they send us messages telling us they’re there,” Settee said.

Recalling a visit to the Kamloops site with Casimir, Settee continued: “You can tell they’re there, right? Feel the power and the energy.”

Settee said outsiders may not understand the cultural significance of such experiences and argued that First Nations should be allowed to leave suspected graves undisturbed: “We just don’t go into any cemetery and start digging up graves just to prove that someone died. It is disrespectful to our culture.”

Money pit

Since 2021, meanwhile, the federal government has spent $285.5 million funding 166 indigenous-led projects through the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund.

This is where the question of museums and historical institutions stops being academic.

When institutions teach citizens that history should be understood primarily through political categories of oppression and identity, they don’t merely reinterpret the past. They can change the standards by which claims about the past are evaluated in the present.

Evidence becomes secondary to narrative; skepticism becomes hostility. And eventually questioning an officially favored interpretation can itself become evidence of moral guilt.

So when Trump demands balance and historical accuracy from the Smithsonian, remember the Canadian example.

Once ideological activists gain control of a country’s history, they don’t necessarily stop at demanding that you hear their interpretation — eventually, they may demand that you believe it.

​Kamloops, Smithsonian museum, Donald trump, Woke, Museums, Culture, Canada, Indian residential schools, Mass graves, Catholic church, First nations, Letter from canada 

The FBI raided Eric Swalwell’s home in the national capital on Sunday as part of an ongoing investigation into sexual assault allegations against the former Democratic congressman from California, sources familiar with the probe told CNN.

The previous day, federal agents reportedly confronted Swalwell at the San Francisco International Airport and confiscated his electronic devices.

‘End the scourge of domestic violence and sexual assault.’

When asked for comment, a spokesman for the Justice Department told Blaze News, “We don’t comment on the existence of investigations or lack thereof.”

The FBI declined to comment.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported in early April than a former congressional staffer had accused Swalwell of sexually assaulting her twice while she was allegedly too intoxicated to consent. The woman also alleged that the Democrat sent her an image of his penis via Snapchat.

Three other women accused Swalwell of various forms of sexual misconduct. One of the accusers, a woman named Ally Sammarco, alleged to CNN that Swalwell sent her unsolicited nude images.

Swalwell responded in a video statement claiming that “these allegations are flat false.”

RELATED: California Democrat probed over alleged ‘inappropriate sexual conduct’ with a staffer

Ronaldo Bolaños/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

“I’ve certainly made mistakes in judgment in my past, but those mistakes are between me and my wife,” said the Democrat.

Despite his protest and denials, the damage was done.

Swalwell — shown in newly declassified FBI documents to have allegedly admitted to having sex with suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang — ultimately ended his gubernatorial campaign in California and resigned from Congress in April.

In the wake of the damning reports, both the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office launched investigations into possible wrongdoing on Swalwell’s part.

In L.A., Swalwell is accused of allegedly drugging and raping a woman named Lonna Drewes in 2018.

Swalwell is also alleged to have sexually assaulted a former staffer in a New York City hotel room in April 2024.

Swalwell’s attorney did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

Swalwell is apparently being held to his own standard. After all, he noted in March 2021, “There’s nothing political or partisan about acting decisively to end the scourge of domestic violence and sexual assault.”

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​Eric swalwell, Sexual assault, Democrat, California, New york, Los angeles, San francisco, Politics 

Britain is among the Western nations whose liberal elites embraced the cult of multiculturalism and repeated the mantra “diversity is our strength” while welcoming unassimilable hordes from the third world. The fallout of this toxic empathy has been severe and far-reaching.

It has gotten so bad, in fact, that the British Home Office evidently saw cause to remind migrants on Wednesday not to rape or mutilate children.

‘The Home Office should instead deport them.’

The government’s new booklet, titled “Understanding behaviours and expectations in the U.K.: A guide for asylum seekers,” states at the outset, “We understand that coming to a new country can be difficult, and that laws and customs here may be different from your home country. In the U.K., there are laws that protect everyone’s safety, dignity, and rights. It is important that you understand them.”

The booklet points out, for instance, that women in the United Kingdom are actually allowed to “work and earn their own money; study and go to school or university; travel freely; choose who they marry, or choose not to marry; [and] make their own decisions about their lives.”

The Home Office underscored that even husbands, fathers, and brothers cannot make decisions for an adult female without her consent.

RELATED: ‘Beyond evil’: Nightmarish report reveals full scale of mass Islamic rapes of ‘250,000’ white British girls

Illegal aliens trying to sail into the English Channel. Tom Nicholson/Getty Images.

In the section on sex and consent, the Home Office informed newcomers that unlike whatever backwaters they may hail from, “In the U.K., the law is clear and strict: Both people must agree to sex or sexual contact of any kind.”

“If someone is asleep, drunk, or unable to respond, they cannot consent,” added the booklet, published just days after an Eritrean migrant, 33-year-old Bruke Desalagne, was found guilty of raping an intoxicated elderly man for 20 minutes outside a church in North London.

After telling asylum seekers that they are expected not to threaten people into having sex with them, the Home Office’s booklet emphasized that statutory rape is indeed a crime.

“The legal age of consent in the U.K. is 16. This means that anyone under the age of 16 is considered a child and cannot legally agree to have sex,” said the document. “There are no exceptions to this rule. Even if they say yes, it is still illegal. You could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim.”

Of course, the United Kingdom won’t deport all foreign child rapists.

For example, the victims of 73-year-old child rapist Shabir Ahmed were informed in June that the criminally convicted leader of a Pakistani grooming gang — which police said victimized as many as 50 girls — was being released from prison and could not be deported due to provisions under the Immigration Act of 1971.

RELATED: What is anarcho-tyranny? Modern Britain gives a disturbing glimpse of our future.

Stuart Brock/Anadolu/Getty Images

Besides reminding migrants that women have rights and that it’s wrong to have sex with children, the Home Office guide noted that asylum seekers are expected to refrain from making sexual comments to strangers, making kissing noises at passersby, stalking individuals in public or blocking their paths, and verbally abusing people because of their religion, sex, or appearance.

The booklet concludes by informing asylum seekers that it is a crime to “take sexual images of someone without their consent” and to “share sexual images of someone without their consent.”

On Wednesday, the Home Office also released a leaflet titled “Keeping children safe in the U.K.,” again reminding asylum seekers that “what is allowed in some countries may be illegal here.”

In addition to reminding foreigners that sex with children is a crime and that children shouldn’t be beaten with “objects like belts or sticks,” the leaflet notes that “female genital mutilation (FGM) and forcing a child to marry are serious crimes in the U.K.”

UK Home Office

Just in case asylum seekers manage to miss these materials, the Home Office apparently has produced posters stating that sex with children “will affect your asylum claim.”

“The Home Office has spent your money to produce these posters for illegal migrants,” tweeted Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. “Why are we letting these people into our country?”

Chris Philp, the Conservative member of parliament serving as shadow home secretary, wrote, “The Home Office has just issued a booklet to illegal immigrants advising them not to commit rape and sexual assault, including of children[.] This tells us all we need to know about the kind of people illegally entering our country.”

“Illegal and legal immigrants are coming from places and societies where attitudes towards women are completely incompatible with Western society,” continued Philp. “It seems like every day there is another report of an illegal immigrant raping or assaulting women and young girls here. Instead of trying to train these mainly young, male illegal immigrants to behave in a civilised way towards women, the Home Office should instead deport them.”

According to data obtained from the U.K. Ministry of Justice by the Telegraph, foreign nationals were responsible for over 25% of sexual assaults on women that were successfully prosecuted in 2024. The Telegraph noted that another 8% of sexual assaults on women were committed by offenders of “unknown” national origins, meaning the overall proportion of convicted foreign-born rapists is likely much higher.

It appears Britons are tiring of all this diversity.

A poll released in November by the National Center for Social Research found that whereas 64% of American respondents said that diversity strengthens society, only 49% of British respondents agreed. Forty percent of Britons said that white people declining as a share of the population was bad for society.

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​Asylum seekers, Britain, Diversity, Multiculturalism, Nigel farage, Rape, Immigration, Politics 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a busy woman. When she’s not posting thirst traps on social media, she’s apparently planning a 2028 presidential run.

And she has no intention of letting anything derail her ambitions, least of all a dirty diaper.

A woman giving birth to her first child at age 42 faces the reality of attending high school graduation at age 60.

The 36-year-old’s recent decision to freeze her eggs, coming shortly after her split from ex-fiancé Riley Roberts, has only heightened speculation. Left-leaning commentators quickly hailed the move as a triumphant act of personal autonomy, a source of inspiration for career-minded women trying to balance climbing the ladder with the inconvenient realities of human biology.

But while Ocasio-Cortez has been canny about harnessing the attention her decision has generated, dismissing her Instagram announcement as an isolated stunt would be a mistake.

Across America, thousands of young women are making the exact same play, putting motherhood on ice to prioritize graduate credentials and promotions.

On ice

Now, a man — and a “privileged” white man in particular — critiquing women’s reproductive choices inevitably invites comparisons to a hyper-liberal female columnist lecturing men on the finer points of masculinity. But there is a crucial difference. While woke gender commentary relies entirely on ideological grievance, hard biological and demographic data back up every single one of the following points.

A single egg-retrieval cycle costs anywhere between $12,000 and $20,000, with annual cryogenic storage fees adding another $1,000 or more just to keep the deep freeze running. Add in injectable hormone regimens that rack up thousands more per round, and the invoice quickly resembles a down payment on a house.

The financial gamble becomes outright predatory when weighed against the clinical evidence.

Eggs retrieved after age 35 have live-birth rates below 20% per batch. Recent studies show that 94% of women who freeze their eggs never even end up using them. In other words, many women put having a child on a mental to-do list right below traveling the world, making partner, or running for office, assuming medical technology will hold the door open indefinitely. They treat cryogenic storage as a biological safety net, paying thousands in annual storage fees for an insurance policy they will likely abandon. By the time they realize the safety net is largely psychological, the biological window has closed, leaving them with an empty nursery, a mountain of storage receipts, and a harsh lesson in the limits of corporate empowerment.

Time’s up

Human biology runs on a clock, and no amount of liquid nitrogen can stop it. The medical risks associated with late-in-life pregnancies expand rapidly with every passing year. The probability of chromosomal abnormalities, including Down syndrome, rises from 1 in 1,250 for a mother at age 25 to 1 in 100 by age 40, spiking to 1 in 30 by age 45. Modern obstetrics performs modern-day miracles, but older pregnancies still carry significantly elevated rates of preeclampsia and premature deliveries.

The physiological tax continues long after leaving the delivery room. For parents entering their 50s, keeping up with energetic ankle-biters can be a torturous affair. A woman giving birth to her first child at age 42 faces the reality of attending high school graduation at age 60, rapidly approaching retirement age while simultaneously taking on university tuition bills. The prospect of ever seeing a grandchild reach adulthood becomes a statistical long shot.

National demographic stability relies on baseline replacement fertility. Specifically, it requires an average of 2.1 births per woman to maintain a functional society. In 2025, the total fertility rate in the U.S. dropped to an all-time low of 1.62 births per woman. By 2034, it is expected to fall to 1.6.

Normalizing the deferral of motherhood into a woman’s late 30s drives birth rates off a demographic cliff. Converting childbearing from a foundational milestone of young adulthood into an afterthought for middle-aged professionals is a slow-motion recipe for economic and cultural suicide.

RELATED: Allie Beth Stuckey responds to AOC blaming ‘hysteria’ for women having kids young

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Double burden

For those wondering how we got here, one needn’t have an advanced degree in sociology to connect the dots. Modern feminism dismisses family life as little more than a foolish career setback. It sells women the lie that a cubicle, a stronger CV, and a performance review are inherently more fulfilling than creating a family. This same careless disregard extends to the political ideology that drove it.

During a recent interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “Woke 1 was crazy,” punctuating the remark with a dismissive chuckle. She may find that era of radical activism amusing in retrospect, but the consequences were anything but funny. Innocent people lost their lives due to defunded police forces. Livelihoods vanished. Reputations were ruined. Social trust was completely incinerated. Yet now that the political winds have shifted, she stands atop the wreckage and simply laughs it off.

Just as that ideological crusade upended social norms, the cultural elevation of cryopreservation now seeks to upend basic human biology. When childbearing is delayed by 15 years, the generational bridge that historically sustained extended families begins to crumble. Grandparents who would otherwise provide vital child care and daily support in their 50s and 60s are instead in their 80s, requiring intensive care themselves just as their adult children are attempting to navigate the demands of newborn parenting.

This dynamic transforms what was once a natural, thriving family support network into a brutal double burden. Exhausted middle-aged parents in the “sandwich generation” are left caught between aging elders who need care and young children who also need care.

So for those who applaud Ocasio-Cortez, it’s worth asking what happens to America if more young women follow her lead. The uncomfortable reality is that many already are. She may yet become a mother in her 40s, but there is no guarantee she will — and many of the women now freezing their eggs may never become mothers either.

​Alexandria ocasio-cortez, Aoc, Childbearing, Cryopreservation, Culture, Egg freezing, Family life, Fertility, Men and woman, Replacement fertility, Woke, Lifestyle, Men and women 

You would think that growing up under an abusive, personality-disordered mother would immunize a writer like me from shock at women’s bad behavior. That’s what I always thought at least.

Then I witnessed the extraordinary outpouring of female sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother who killed her three children in 2023.

Some Clancy girls now claim Lindsay’s poor husband, Patrick, actually killed the kids and framed her. How do they know this? Astrology of course.

Clancy, a former labor and delivery nurse, is now on trial for murder. Her children were Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, eight months old.

There is no dispute about who killed them. Clancy’s defense admits she strangled all three children with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s home while her husband, Patrick, was out picking up medicine and takeout. The question for the jury is whether she was criminally responsible when she did it.

Her lawyers say she wasn’t. They argue that Clancy suffered from postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder and that psychiatric medications worsened her condition. Prosecutors say she deliberately arranged to get her husband out of the house and knew exactly what she was doing.

Clancy girls

I don’t know what the jury will decide. What I do know is what thousands of women have decided already.

Across social media, a group of women I’ll call “Clancy girls” have turned Lindsay Clancy into an object of identification and affection. They see her as a poor, unsupported, overwhelmed mother who begged for help and was failed by everyone.

Does this shock you? I hope it does. It is real, and it is deadly serious.

We have a dire, immediate, society-wide problem of women identifying with evil, sympathizing with evil, and financially supporting evil.

It should be socially unthinkable for anyone, let alone thousands of women, to openly weep for a woman who killed her three children by strangling them with exercise bands. Even 20 years ago, this moral derangement would have made a woman a pariah if she dared to speak it out loud.

Not anymore. In fact, the Clancy girls are going out of their way to exonerate this modern Medea.

‘Wonderful mom’

Take the Musgrove Family Fund. It has raised almost a million dollars for Clancy’s parents, Mike and Paula Musgrove, who have relocated from Connecticut to Massachusetts and incurred substantial expenses while remaining close to their daughter throughout the criminal proceedings. The organizers are careful to say that donating does not require taking Lindsay’s side: “Nothing about this fund asks anyone to share their view of Lindsay or the criminal case.”

Yet judging from the comments, many of the female donors are more than happy to offer Lindsay absolution:

Strong support and hugs for Lindsay and her supportive parents. My sister was also an RN when she went through PPD+PPS. It was so hard to watch her go through it.

We stand beside and behind you Lindsay and family. I struggled with PPD and PPA and many times it felt like I was asking for help, reaching up only to grab air. I am sending lots of love and virtual hugs.

I know it feels like it now, but you’re not alone Lindsay. Your emotion and love for your babies is felt through the screen. From one mom who’s been through psychosis to another — I just want to wrap my arms around you and shower you with love and support. You ARE a wonderful mom. It wasn’t you that day. It may have been your body, but it certainly wasn’t your mind or thoughts. — from a Kentucky mom

Love and “virtual hugs” for this “wonderful mom.” Personal emotional identification with a woman who committed a crime so depraved it forms one of the darkest psychological archetypes in Western mythology.

In the stars

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe Lindsay Clancy had a psychotic break. I don’t believe she was suffering from postpartum psychosis. I don’t believe that “too many psychiatric drugs” caused her to hallucinate and lose her mind. It’s hard to see how that’s possible when the evidence shows Clancy didn’t even take the recommended dosage of the drugs, or took them for a few days and stopped after that.

I believe Clancy shows the signs of narcissistic personality disorder and that she’s lying about having hallucinations to cover up the fact that she wanted her children dead because they interfered with the lifestyle and attention she believed she was entitled to. I think she killed them because their existence on earth meant that everything couldn’t be about Lindsay all the time.

It gets worse. Some Clancy girls now claim Lindsay’s poor husband, Patrick, actually killed the kids and framed her. How do they know this? Astrology of course.

Whatever the truth may be, it doesn’t ameliorate the shocking, reflexive sympathy countless women are displaying. Instead of being stunned by a diabolical, almost unthinkable murder, women across social media (and in hair salons, according to reports from my friends overhearing chitchat) see the mother who killed her children as the real victim.

This is moral depravity at a scale nigh unbelievable.

RELATED: ‘Carrie’ and the monster who raised me

Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images

The patriarchy did it

No one would make these excuses for a male family annihilator, which is what Lindsay Clancy is. Almost no one popped up to defend Chris Watts. No one wanted to “start a conversation about the pressure fathers are under” to deflect from the fact that he murdered his family.

No one makes mental health excuses for men who exterminate their children. It’s only women who get this sympathy.

Why?

Since the 1960s, Americans have been under a delusional spell called “feminism.” This magical spell managed to convince an entire country that women in the richest country in the world were unbearably oppressed. All of a sudden, all traditions were overturned. Motherhood became a burden. Children became a ball and chain forced on women by patriarchal men.

Feminism took over everyone’s mind, left, right, and center. Men and women. It has long been accepted as fact that women were always and ever subjugated by men. That having children was a prison sentence imposed on women. That being married and raising a family deprived women of making their mark in the world.

Feminism is a lie, and it is a tool of the narcissistic, resentful mind. It has pitted women against men and against their own children. It has convinced millions of women in the freest and most wealthy country in world history that they are “unsupported” and “exploited.”

Shock and despair

It would be hysterically funny if the consequences weren’t so egregious.

But they are. Lindsay Clancy stands a decent chance of being let off under the insanity plea because we refuse to acknowledge a fundamental aspect of human nature that everyone knew until the mid-20th century: Women have the capacity to do evil.

I put my abusive, narcissistic, psychopathic mother out of my life permanently 10 years ago. That’s long enough to be over the initial shock and despair of discovering that the one person I was supposed to be able to trust tried to destroy me. It doesn’t keep me awake nights any longer.

But I’m sleepless this week after discovering a new horror: If my mother had succeeded in killing me, my sister, or my brother, our names would be forgotten. Our mother would be seen as a tragic victim, a single mother “failed” by everyone.

At least she’d get hugs.

​Crime, Lindsay clancy, Filicide, Culture, Postpartum depression, First person, Motherhood, Feminism, Intervention 

Barack Obama once delivered the line Republicans never let him forget: “You didn’t build that.”

Today, the Democratic Party could say something similar to him. Barack Obama didn’t build Barack Obama alone.

The transformation Obama promised in 2008 is still under way, and he is content to let others finish it.

The talent, intelligence, and ambition were his. But the stage belonged to the Democratic Party. Its donors supplied the money, its convention supplied the audience, and its voters supplied the office that transformed a little-known Illinois politician into a global figure.

Now the institution that helped build Obama is struggling to decide what it believes.

Obama turned 65 this month. He is four years younger than Donald Trump was when Trump descended the escalator and began remaking the Republican Party.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, the Republican Party did not build him. He arrived with his own fortune, celebrity, audience, and brand, then captured the party despite the resistance of much of its establishment.

Obama’s path was nearly the reverse. In 2000, he couldn’t even obtain a floor credential at the Democratic National Convention. Four years later, Democrats put him behind the convention lectern. Four years after that, he was their nominee for president.

The Democratic Party didn’t merely nominate Barack Obama. It introduced him to America.

For more than a decade, opposition to Trump supplied Democrats with something resembling a governing philosophy. Rage generated money, turnout, and unity.

But rage is fuel, not a destination. And Democrats are discovering that when Trump is removed from the sentence, they have difficulty completing it.

The party’s ascendant left has now captured Michigan’s Democratic Senate nomination through Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Hasan Piker. After El-Sayed’s victory, Obama called him for what the candidate described as a “really warm” conversation.

RELATED: El-Sayed aide says Rogers ad with vintage truck and US flags is like a ‘KKK cross burning’

Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

That call raises a question Obama has so far avoided: Does the party’s left represent an unruly faction, or is it becoming the party’s center of gravity?

Democrats talk endlessly about the virtues of a big tent. But a big tent without a center pole is just a tarp.

Obama remains the one Democrat with enough stature to supply that center.

He has not disappeared. He endorses candidates, gives speeches, and meets privately with lawmakers. Those appearances may help individual candidates. They do not provide direction for a party that increasingly seems unsure where it wants to go.

Obama once possessed the power to name a destination. “Hope and change” invited millions of Americans to imagine a country beyond the politics they knew.

Where is he asking his party to go now?

He could tell Democrats what liberalism must preserve, what progressivism must not replace, and what conduct the party will not tolerate.

Unless, of course, the ascendant left is the destination.

What are Democrats for when they are not against Donald Trump?

Endorsing candidates spends celebrity. Leadership spends political capital.

Democrats describe Trump as an existential threat who may destroy American democracy. Yet Obama confines himself largely to endorsements, private conversations, and measured speeches.

Either the danger is as grave as Democrats insist, in which case Obama’s restraint is difficult to defend, or the rhetoric is exaggerated, in which case his restraint helps expose it.

And if the party’s left threatens traditional liberalism, why won’t he confront it? If it represents the party’s future, why won’t he say so?

His warm reception of El-Sayed suggests a third possibility: The transformation Obama promised in 2008 is still under way, and he is content to let others finish it.

RELATED: Woke 2.0 is coming … and it will be worse

Sarah Rice/Getty Images

Perhaps Obama believes his duty is done. Perhaps the party has moved somewhere he does not wish to follow. Perhaps he wants influence without ownership of the consequences.

Or perhaps the Democratic Party was always more useful to Barack Obama than Barack Obama intended to remain useful to the Democratic Party.

He once reminded successful Americans that they had benefited from institutions they did not create.

He was right about at least one American.

The Democratic Party helped build Barack Obama. Now the Democratic Party needs rebuilding.

Kennedy pointed to the moon. Reagan pointed to a certain wall he wanted torn down. Trump descended an escalator pointing toward a wall he wanted built.

Where is Barack Obama pointing the Democratic Party?

​Barack obama, Bernie sanders, Democratic party, Donald trump, Hasan piker, Republican party, Progressivism, Abdul el-sayed, 2026 midterms, Opinion & analysis 

The battle for censorship online has been raging on social media for more than a decade.

Netizens have clamored for unfettered free speech, while their detractors say that some things are better left not said. Somewhere in the middle, though, exists a new app that is going viral for one line: “Jesus is watching you!”

‘Half of the songs nowadays have no clean version.’

A post seen by more than 1 million people on X alluded to a Big Brother-style app that monitors the listening habits of music lovers. However, one chat with the app’s founder is likely to put that idea to bed.

The app is called Verso, and while on its face it is indeed an app designed to help censor music, the application’s stated intent is to fill in the gap of parental control settings on streaming services by acting as an intentional filter between the service and the listener.

Citing that around 92% of today’s top streaming songs are explicit, Verso says it wants to put parents and families in control of what they hear.

Co-founder Jonathan Bernal told Blaze News directly that he left his former job with the Google Gemini AI team because he wanted to use his skills to develop technology that supports the family unit, unlike most tech out there.

“Kids hear everything,” Verso says in its video. Bernal backs that up.

“Half a billion families are listening to music, and half of the songs nowadays have no clean version,” he said. “Parents are constantly reaching for the mute or skip button.”

In order ensure a listening experience in which parents don’t have to worry about blasting out adult content, the app syncs with music streaming services and filters out profanity or certain themes entirely. The system is akin to a time when content moderation on television could be trusted.

RELATED: Tracking device exposes Amazon’s secret plans for rare books

To avoid a one-size-fits-all application, Bernal said it was important for the app to be able to make any song instantly “customizable.”

“You can make it family-friendly; you can make any song align with your values,” Bernal said.

This comes through the settings, where users can filter out sexual innuendo, profanity, sacrilegious messages, or anything they consider to be unpalatable. All of those options can be applied globally, but the fun part comes in the individual settings.

Any song specifically can be changed, and users are free to customize how the music gets censored. Bernal noted how many videos have gone viral of parents on TikTok using duck sounds for when their kids are in the car.

RELATED: Wi-Fi. Microwaves. Electromagnetism. It’s all connected — and so is the damage.

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images

For clarification, the entrepreneur said yes, the viral image of the app asking users to repent is real.

Bernal said he is a Christian man and hopes to continue the app’s success so he can help promote the family unit.

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​Censorship, Streaming, Tech 

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle evidently weren’t cut out for the land of the free. After braving a few years of luxury in Los Angeles, they’re now planning to pull up stakes and retreat to Britain.

Royal flush

After British taxpayers were squeezed for roughly $3 million to refurbish the couple’s 18th-century home on the grounds of Windsor Castle estate, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex announced in January 2020 their decision to “carve out a progressive new role within this institution” and “step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family.”

‘I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back.’

They dawdled around Canada for a time, then moved to the United States in 2020 to purportedly pursue a “more peaceful,” private life free of royal duties.

In February 2021, Buckingham Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth had informed the duke and duchess that:

in stepping away from the work of the Royal Family it is not possible to continue with the responsibilities and duties that come with a life of public service. The honorary military appointments and Royal patronages held by the Duke and Duchess will therefore be returned to Her Majesty, before being redistributed among working members of the Royal Family.

Liberated from the responsibilities and honors bequeathed to the prince by his forefathers, the duo has spent recent years chasing the limelight.

The DEI duchess — who upon settling in California suggested on multiple occasions that Britain is racist and that she and Prince Harry left because of supposed bigotry in the House of Windsor — has not, however, enjoyed the kind of media success for which she apparently pined.

RELATED: INGRATE BRITAIN: ‘Good Place’ star Jameela Jamil calls fellow Brits ‘evil,’ likens them to Marvel villain

Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Netflix announced in July 2021 that Markle’s animated feminist series “Pearl” was going into production. The project was flushed the following summer.

‘F**king grifters.’

While the couple’s 2024 Netflix docuseries “Polo” — dubbed an “unintentional comedy” by the Guardian — actually made it to air, it was a total flop.

Earlier this year, Netflix divested from Markle’s lifestyle brand As Ever and decided not to renew her cooking show “With Love, Meghan.”

The couple had a lucrative deal with Spotify valued at roughly $20 million, but that collapsed in 2023 after the duke and duchess failed to produce more than one series and a holiday special. At the time, a Spotify executive branded them “f**king grifters.”

The couple’s latest flop, a documentary called “Cookie Queens” that they executive-produced, had made less than $600,000 as of Aug. 18, according to reported box-office figures.

Retreat

The couple has decided to move back to Britain sometime this month, according to an exclusive report from the Telegraph.

King Charles was reportedly informed of the couple’s decision on Sunday.

Their children, 7-year-old Prince Archie and 5-year-old Princess Lilibet, have been enrolled to start school in the U.K., a part of the world that Prince Harry once complained “has been created by white people for white people.”

The Telegraph noted that the couple plans to keep their homes in Montecito, California, and Portugal, and that Markle will run her lifestyle brand from the United Kingdom.

When asked about what motivated the return, a source close to the couple told CNN only that they enjoyed their family visit to Britain in July.

On the question of security for the duke and duchess, a Home Office spokesman told the Guardian, “The U.K. government’s protective security system is rigorous and proportionate,” adding that “it is our longstanding policy not to provide detailed information on those arrangements, as doing so could compromise their integrity and affect individuals’ security.”

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said, “We wish them well in the move that they’re making.”

The royals’ decision to return comes one year after Prince Harry stated that despite missing his homeland, “I can’t see a world in which I would be bringing my wife and children back to the U.K. at this point.”

Blaze News did not immediately receive comment from Buckingham Palace or the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

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​Meghan markle, Prince harry, Duke of sussex, Royal family, House of windsor, Britain, Netflix, Politics