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. This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.   Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey,” is in the news lately, primarily because Christopher Nolan has produced a three-hour, and I can use the word impressionistic, retelling of “The Odyssey.” And a lot of people have criticized it; a lot of people like it.  I’m gonna talk about the film later in one of our episodes, because I have now seen the new film, and Jack Fowler and Sami Wink and I have talked variously about it.  But I wanted to today just talk about “The Odyssey” as a work of literature and history. A lot of people, I think, have the wrong impressions.  We hear that Homer wrote this or wrote that. He did not write it. It was composed orally. What do I mean by that? I mean, the actual incident of a Trojan War probably occurred somewhere between 1200 BC and 1100 BC, in the last gasp, so to speak, of the Mycenaean palatial culture in Greece.  Now, the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers, but their mode of economic, cultural, political organization was more Near Eastern, more like the Hittites or the Egyptians.  In other words, they had palaces that, in sort of a totalitarian fashion, parceled out food and shelter and land, and then received taxes and tribute at a central clearing house, all recorded on Linear B tablets: the Greek language, but without the Phoenician-like alphabet, which had not been invented yet.  So when that collapsed, whether it was because of the Dorian invasion or whether it was because of sea peoples who swept in and destroyed these vulnerable, centrally located palaces in Mycenaean civilization, if you decapitated Gla or Thebes or Mycenae or Argos, then the entire structure would have no central direction.  There was not a lot of independent, autonomous people. So this culture vanished right after the Trojan War. And we should remember that because in the poem, a lot of people have trouble getting back from Troy, and when they get back, what they find is not good. Odysseus comes back; suitors are in his house.  Agamemnon comes back; he’s killed. Ajax doesn’t come back. I could go on, and that might reflect the oral poetry’s attempt over subsequent centuries to show that there was an actual Mycenaean event.   So what’s happened is the society collapsed, and we probably saw one-tenth of the population survive, and there was not sophisticated agriculture anymore, monumental building, none of the signs of the Mycenaean prosperity and security.  It was a dark age: a small, scattered, decentralized population, more goat, sheep, and cattle raising than intensive farming, and more confined to the Greek peninsula itself rather than a Mediterranean-wide seafaring people.  During this depression era, I guess we would call it analogous to the European Dark Ages, roughly from the sixth century AD to nine hundred AD, all writing of the Mycenaeans was lost. People lost all knowledge of what had gone on and after, oh, we could say 20 or 25 generations, they magnified what little they remembered about the Mycenaeans, as you would expect.  This was the era of Greek mythmaking. So when a farmer or a herder or anybody walked by a Mycenaean palace in ruins, he said, “The Cyclops must have built it.”  Or if he fell into a tholos tomb, he’d say, “There were great demigods who built this.” And the tales of the Mycenaean lords then became exaggerated when they were carried on generation after generation by schools of bards. Perhaps they were disabled, perhaps they were blind like Homer reputedly was, but they kept the stories alive.  Now, we only have two of them: “The Odyssey,” about the return of Odysseus from the Trojan War, and “The Iliad,” a four- or five-day snapshot of the 10-year-long war. But we know there was probably 20 or 30 tales about the kidnapping of Helen, the sack of Troy, whatever happened to Agamemnon, etc., etc.  In these oral poems, then, Homer would get together with people, and over about a day and a half, almost two days, he would recite 1,200 lines, the entire poetry, by memory.  Now, because things repeat, one-third of the poem is repeated. That’s the way the oral poet composed. So if he wanted to move from the Calypso scene back to a very different atmosphere on Ithaca, then he could just plug in entire type scenes: how to build a raft, how to build a fire.  And these repetitions can be from the noun-adjective, swift-footed Achilles, long-suffering Odysseus, or they can be a whole line or a whole page in a modern text, but it was not written down. Somehow, Homer was probably the last generation in this bardic tradition when the city-state reemerged under a Western concept that we would call Western civilization.  Sophisticated learning, writing returns with a Phoenician alphabet, history, rhetoric, science, all of that starts to reemerge, or get born maybe is a better word, and the last version of Homer is written down, and the bardic tradition ends.   So Homer then is the authoritative text for these stories, and we don’t know his predecessors.  Now, very quickly: Well, what’s the history of it then? The history of, in “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad,” there’s little, tiny memories of Mycenaean civilization five or six hundred years earlier. In the second book of “The Iliad,” there’s a catalog of ships, and they name all the places where the Greeks came from.  And believe me, Homer, in that period when he composed it, 750, had no idea where some of those places were. There’s a mention of a silver-studded long sword or a boar’s-tooth helmet. He doesn’t know what those are. He just knows that they sound old, and they’re carried down generation, generation, generation in the bardic oral tradition.  We know that there are some grammatical forms that are not Ionic, like those that Homer composed when he was probably a resident of what is now western Turkey or the Cycladic Islands, I should say the islands near the coast of modern Turkey or Ionia. And we call that the Ionian dialect. That’s what most of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” are composed in.  Remember, twelve thousand lines, but it’s in a hexameter, dactylic hexameter. Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. The line ends don’t rhyme, but they have the same shared meter.   And here and there, there’s what we call Arcadio-Cypriot grammatical signs, and that we know that when the Mycenaean palaces fell, people fled to Arcadia and Cyprus, and maybe some of their dialect got included into the bardic tradition.  So there are Mycenaean relics, and then over those four or five centuries of bardic transmission, there’s a lot of Dark Age things. And that would be primacy of javelin throwing or archery over close combat, or it would be more tales of goat herdsmen and lamb herdsmen and cattle than olive growing or grain growing or grape growing.  And then there’s the majority of it, I would say 55 to 60%: Homer being a unique genius and the one bardic poet we know of in that long tradition, the one closest to the city-state and the one whose version was recorded and therefore saved with a written text because writing had reemerged.  We know that he drew on things from his own contemporary world, and there is intensive agriculture. Laertes’ farm is intensively farmed. There are people in assemblies now that vote. We know in “The Iliad” there’s a mention of mass warfare, not just chariot or javelin or archery, but massed heavily armed people with spears that would resemble Homer’s own time, with phalanx or what we call hoplite warfare.  Let me just finish then. What do critics get wrong? They criticize Christopher Nolan because there’s not Bronze Age armor, but there isn’t in Homer either. There are just little traces of evidence from the Mycenaean or Bronze Age. They criticize him because of the dialogue. Well, we don’t know. And that’s from a different translation by Emily Wilson.  There are better translations. Richard Lattimore’s is the best. But the dialect in Homer is repetitive and, as I said, formulaic, and it doesn’t approximate what most people are speaking.   So if you’re gonna criticize the colloquial verse of Matt Damon, you have a point in that Homer’s own poem, when people heard it in 750 orally recited, or they read it 100 years later when it was composed or redone with a written text, it would have sounded archaic and not necessarily colloquial.  These are just some of the items that are in the background of Homer’s Odyssey, and to the degree that they frame a film version, or to the degree that a director should work within both the poem and the historic realities in which it was composed, I’ll talk about in a subsequent one of our talks.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

“When in the course of human events …” With those words, Thomas Jefferson began the Declaration of Independence and gave voice to a proposition that would change the world. The phrase is not ornamental. It is the architecture of political history. Nations are born, tested, defended, and sometimes squandered by human events: decisions made by men and women in real time, under pressure, for good or ill. History, properly understood, is the disciplined account of those events over time. It is a chronology of human action, animated by moral consequences and grounded in fact. That was the essential point made by Matthew Spalding, Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C. campus, when he testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency. The hearing, “Rewriting American History: Examining the Smithsonian’s Efforts to Reshape the Past,” examined the National Museum of American History and its recent effort to replace the story of America with an activist ideology aimed at transforming the future. Spalding’s testimony was measured, scholarly, and devastating. “Historical knowledge is to a civilization what memory is to the individual person,” Spalding said. That sentence alone should be printed above the entrance to every museum in Washington. A person without memory is disoriented, vulnerable, and easily manipulated. A people without historical memory is the same. It cannot understand who it is, where it came from, what it owes, or what it must preserve. To strip a nation of its story is civic sabotage—vandalism. Spalding began where all serious accounts of history should begin: with events, with chronology, with individuals, with choices. “Great individuals—Winston Churchill called them the steppingstones of history—shape history by making decisions and taking actions intended to change its course,” he testified. That is true of George Washington accepting command of the Continental Army, Jefferson drafting the Declaration, Abraham Lincoln preserving the Union, Frederick Douglass exposing the moral evil of slavery, and countless others who acted, sacrificed, erred, repented, persevered, and built. History tells us what they did, why they did it, and what followed. It does not begin with an ideological conclusion and then rummage through the past for exhibits that confirm that conclusion. That is precisely why the Smithsonian Institution exists. Congress created it in 1846 to fulfill the will of James Smithson, who left his estate to the United States “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” Those words are statutory and moral guideposts. The Smithsonian is not a pressure group, a faculty seminar, or a taxpayer-funded activist collective. It exists to increase and diffuse knowledge. That mission was once understood clearly. Smithsonian leadership argued in 1953 that the museum that became the National Museum of American History should create “a stimulating permanent exposition that commemorates our heritage of freedom and highlights the basic elements of our way of life.” The Smithsonian Secretary told Congress the museum would “instill in each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny as champion of individual dignity and enterprise.” At its opening, the director said the museum would “awaken in citizen and foreigner alike a clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States—its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.” President Lyndon B. Johnson said its artifacts should be used “to foster patriotism.” That was not propaganda. It was common sense. A national museum of American history should tell the American national story. It should do so truthfully, seriously, and chronologically. It should not hide injustice or romanticize failure. It should not erase slavery, segregation, anti-Catholicism, nativism, wartime excesses, or the long struggle to vindicate the promise of the Declaration. But neither should it reduce the American experience to an indictment. The national story is not a sanitized pageant, but it is also not a prosecutorial brief. Spalding’s charge is that the National Museum of American History has abandoned that mission. “The National Museum of American History is no longer the nation’s museum of American history,” he testified. That is a grave accusation, but he did not make it casually. He pointed to the White House Domestic Policy Council report “Saving America’s Story,” which catalogues controversial and objectionable displays in more than 160 pages and 522 footnotes. Yet Spalding wisely insisted that the details, though important, are not the heart of the matter. The details are symptoms. The disease is deeper. “The real crime here, premeditated and followed through,” Spalding testified, “is that America’s story—the well-established narrative of main characters and key events that has long been written about, researched, taught about, and been at the center of American self-understanding throughout much of our national existence—has been so reframed, jettisoned, decentered, deconstructed, and ‘problematized’ at the NMAH that it no longer exists in recognizable form.” That sentence is the core of his written indictment. The issue is not whether one label should be rewritten or one exhibit rearranged. It is whether the museum still believes America has a coherent story worth telling. The answer, on the evidence Spalding presented, is no. He described a museum that has replaced the national narrative with “an altogether new and controversial approach,” defined by “abstract post-modern theories that see history as nothing more than an oppressive power struggle” and use history “as a tool in that struggle to encourage social change.” That may be fashionable in certain academic departments. It may even be defended in academic conferences littered with panels pregnant with unintelligible gibberish. But as Spalding rightly put it, “it shouldn’t be the rubric for a Smithsonian Museum.” No kidding.  The museum still possesses incomparable artifacts: the desk on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration, Washington’s uniform as commander in chief of the Continental Army, and the great flag that inspired the National Anthem. These objects are not relics of a dead regime. They are material witnesses to a living republic. Properly presented, they teach gratitude, humility, courage, and obligation. They do and should inspire. Improperly framed, they become props in a therapeutic exercise in national self-loathing. The ideological redesign Spalding described did not happen by accident. He quoted the current director’s stated objective: “At the National Museum of American History, we work to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history for visitors to our museum and digital spaces.”   Reframe?  That is not neutral curatorship but a declaration of purpose. The task is not to preserve and explain the American past, but to concoct an alternative narrative. The new narrative is not the Declaration, the Constitution, ordered liberty, republican self-government, sacrifice, invention, prosperity, and the repeated struggle to live up to first principles. The new frame is systemic oppression. The institutional mechanism for this shift is revealing. Spalding cited the museum’s Center for Restorative History, whose own materials say restorative history draws “on the principles of restorative justice” and addresses the needs of “historically harmed communities” by examining “the root causes of historical harms.” The communities named include “black, indigenous, and other people of color,” as well as “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and more,” and the root cause is identified as “systemic oppression.” The Center describes restorative history as a “systemic intervention” aimed at “transforming the national historical narrative, restructuring institutional priorities, and privileging knowledge production in the communities that have been silenced or overlooked by museums and other educational institutions.” There is no mystery here. The museum has adopted a theory, a vocabulary, and a mission alien to its original purpose. Its new strategic plan replaces the previous mission—“explore the infinite richness and complexity of American history”—with a new charge: “Empowering people to create a more just and compassionate future by exploring, preserving, and sharing the complexity of our past.” Notice the substitutions. “American history” becomes “our past.” “Infinite richness” disappears. Understanding gives way to empowerment. Knowledge becomes an instrument for political and social transformation. Spalding is right to call this ideology. “This is not a history based on established facts and known reality,” he testified. “Indeed, it is not history at all. This is ideology, a systematic framework for interpreting society and instigating an agenda for change.” That distinction matters. History asks what happened. Ideology asks how the past can be arranged to serve present political ends. History is disciplined by evidence. Ideology is disciplined by a preferred conclusion. History teaches. Ideology activates. The two exhibits Spalding identified—“American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith” and “Many Voices, One Nation”—illustrate the problem. According to his testimony, the first deconstructs and reinterprets the American idea as resistance to persistent racial hierarchies and systemic flaws through petition and protest. The second reframes “our past” as cross-cultural encounters of identity groups seeking restorative justice. In tandem, the exhibits do not merely add neglected voices to the American story. They displace the story itself. That distinction is crucial. No serious person objects to telling the full story of America, including those who were excluded from the promise of liberty and those who fought to claim it. The American story includes the enslaved, the abolitionists, the soldiers, the suffragists, the immigrants, the inventors, the statesmen, the reformers, the pioneers, the entrepreneurs, the dissenters, and the martyrs. But inclusion should deepen the story, not dissolve it. A museum can and should show the whole American family album. It should not tear the album apart and rearrange the fragments to prove that the family itself was illegitimate from the start. Congress has a special obligation here because the Smithsonian is not a private foundation. It is a public trust supported by taxpayers. Americans have every right to expect that the National Museum of American History will present their history with accuracy, balance, gratitude, and candor. They have every right to object when the museum is turned into a vehicle for elite ideological propaganda. They have every right to insist that federal funding not subsidize national self-loathing. Spalding’s remedy is not erasure. In fact, he explicitly rejected it. A national museum, he said, should tell the story “warts and all,” so visitors understand “the basic chronological narrative and see how the nation got to where it is today.” “Nothing should be erased or whitewashed.” That is the conservative position rightly understood. Not nostalgia. Not denial. Not hagiography. Truth. Context. Chronology. Proportion. A serious account of a flawed but extraordinary nation. So what should the museum teach? It should teach that America was founded on universal principles announced in the Declaration and institutionalized, imperfectly but powerfully, in the Constitution. It should teach that some of those principles were violated from the beginning and that Americans fought, argued, bled, legislated, amended, and sacrificed to bring practice closer to promise. It should teach that liberty requires virtue, self-government requires memory, and citizenship requires gratitude as well as judgment. It should teach the “origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength” of the United States. Spalding’s most important passage came near the end of his testimony. “A healthy attachment to this country is neither blind to its flaws nor fanatical in believing that America is the source of all good,” he said. “Nevertheless, each generation should be equipped with a knowledge of America’s founding principles, a reverence for their liberties, and a profound love of their country.” That is exactly right. Patriotism is not blindness. It is not a demand that citizens ignore injustice or silence dissent. It is love of country strong enough to bear criticism because it is rooted in truth, gratitude, and duty. Such patriotism is indispensable to republican government. A free people will not preserve institutions they have been taught to despise. They will not defend liberties they do not understand. They will not transmit a constitutional inheritance if they are told that inheritance is only a mask for oppression. Museums, schools, and civic institutions do not have to flatter the nation. But if they teach only contempt, they will produce citizens incapable of self-government. That is why Spalding’s testimony matters. It is not a complaint about one museum exhibit. It is a warning about a broader collapse of civic confidence and institutional trust. When public institutions abandon their stated purpose, substitute activism for knowledge, and disguise ideology as scholarship, they betray both Congress and the people. The Smithsonian was founded for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” It was not created to diffuse grievance, resentment, or fashionable theories of systemic guilt. The National Museum of American History should be worthy of the artifacts it holds. It should tell visitors why Jefferson’s desk matters, why Washington’s uniform matters, why the Star-Spangled Banner matters, why the Declaration and Constitution still command reverence, and why millions from across the world have seen in America a promise unavailable elsewhere. It should tell the truth about slavery and emancipation, segregation and civil rights, war and sacrifice, failure and redemption. But it should do so as part of a coherent national narrative, not as scattered evidence in a case against the country. “A museum focused on claims of systemic oppression teaches national self-loathing,” Spalding concluded. “A museum that embraces America’s exceptional principles and teaches America’s powerful history—its ‘glory tale of liberating strife,’ as the patriotic hymn goes—is worthy of a great country, worthy of congressional funding, and worthy to shaping the minds and hearts of America’s citizens, now and in the future.” Congress should take him seriously. So should the Smithsonian. So should every American who understands that a republic without memory is a republic in peril.

World leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to honor the life and legacy of Lindsey Graham. Memorials took place across the city throughout the day, sparking foreign policy meetings at the White House and trade deals as the Senate prepared to vote on a Russia sanctions bill in the evening. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, congressional leaders, Cabinet members, and Graham’s family attended invitation-only memorial services at the U.S. Capitol and the Washington National Cathedral. Late U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on July 11, 2026, from a torn aorta at age 71. On Tuesday morning, his casket was carried through the Capitol Rotunda for a service honoring his time in the military and as a U.S. senator. Vice President JD Vance and Senate Majority Leader John Thune gave remarks. Global Leaders Honor Lindsey Graham as His Final Fight Heads to the Senate FloorWorld leaders gathered in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday to honor the life and legacy of Lindsey Graham. Memorials took place across the city, throughout the day, sparking foreign policy meetings at… pic.twitter.com/2Ck8uZ7cTs— Daily Signal (@DailySignal) July 28, 2026 “Lindsey Graham could make anybody laugh, and he could make anybody feel at home,” Vance said. “It was impossible not to like him. That swashbuckling, infectious laugh, that attitude, that passion that so many others have talked about. Lindsey Graham was impossible not to like as a human being, and of course, as a United States senator.” The vice president continued, speaking highly of Graham’s character and recounting stories from their time together in the Senate and on the campaign trail. “Because he loved people, he saw that the Senate, at its very best, could be a deliberate body geared toward persuading people, and that’s what he did,” Vance said, crediting Graham with the Senate’s confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Later in the afternoon, Trump, Zelenskyy, and Netanyahu attended a service at the National Cathedral following their separate meetings at the White House. The president gave a tribute, followed by Sean Hannity, and also Graham’s niece, Emillie Boggs Roberts. “Scripture tells us, ‘Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life.’ For 71 years, Lindsey Graham was strong and steadfast,” Trump said. “Lindsey, we love you. God bless you. We will always be with you, and you were very, very special.” Watch in full: President Donald J. Trump's remarks honoring the life and legacy of Senator Lindsey Graham pic.twitter.com/hi9UVgxpT5— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 28, 2026 “Lindsey Graham believed in a strong America,” Trump added. “He had unwavering faith in the righteousness of American power. … He felt in his bones that our destiny is to win, and that his job was to do everything he could to ensure our enemies would lose.” “It’s a testament to his towering impact that among those mourning him here today are leaders, presidents, and prime ministers from all over the globe,” Trump continued. The Russia sanctions bill, which Graham worked on up until his death, has been renamed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 ahead of its first vote. Anyone who buys oil from Russia to help fund their unjust war against Ukraine and criminal attacks on Ukrainian citizens should be held accountable.These sanctions are critical for America’s interests and our security. I’m glad the Senate is carrying on Senator Graham’s… pic.twitter.com/ZxgmqxLcJM— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) July 28, 2026 Though it has 62 co-sponsors and will likely pass with ease in the Senate, Zelenskyy is set to meet with senators Tuesday evening ahead of the first procedural vote to get skeptical Democrats on board. Since Graham’s passing, the legislation, meant to apply pressure to Russia’s energy economy amid Moscow’s continued invasion of Ukraine, has been amended and trimmed down. The original 500% sanction on countries that buy Russian oil and gas has been reduced to 100% and will affect only the top five importers. The White House will have the authority to waive sanctions if it can prove a national security justification.

Former Virginia Attorney General and acting Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli recently announced he was bringing his Election Transparency Initiative (ETI) into the Heritage Foundation. ETI helps conservatives fight election fraud before it happens.Cuccinelli spoke this week with Daily Signal Virginia correspondent Joe Thomas about the initiative and the new partnership with Heritage. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity. Joe Thomas: Welcome to Heritage. Did you ever think that you guys would be part of the Heritage Foundation? Ken Cuccinelli: Certainly not until this year. You know, we pushed along really independently. And in terms of raw manpower, we’re relatively small shop. So, one of the huge benefits of merging in under the Heritage umbrella is we bring an awful lot of election expertise and manpower to that issue. For example, at Heritage Action, they have the whole Sentinel program already set up where they have a grassroots network of local leaders who already care about this issue, who we can help move the needle where they live. So this is definitely a synergistic opportunity, which means that the sum is greater than the parts. And we look forward to having even more impact as time goes on. JT: I know you’ve done some work with my friends at the Virginia Institute for Public Policy and other organizations like that across the country. Talk about where you’ve been up to this point and what you’ve been able to manifest. KC: Well, and the Virginia Institute was a key player in starting the Election Integrity Network, which is nationwide and who we partner with all the time. And we have had a longstanding practice of coming into states to support state leadership in pursuing good policies or blocking bad ones, rather than coming in and assuming leadership.  And that’s a big difference I won’t name organizations that do it, but there are organizations that have a Washington focus, let’s just say, who come into states and act like they’re the whole ballgame and claim credit for everything. I will name one of them, the RNC. One of the things that we have done at the Election Transparency Initiative is we have encouraged people to become election officials, not partisan poll watchers, but election officials. Go get trained. The Election Integrity Network does a lot of this. Again, one of the coalition partners we work with. And there are others in states. You want to trust an election? Run it yourself. And there are more people on the Left inside the polling places than on the Right. But in the last five years, we have helped close that gap substantially. Drives the Left crazy, because they used to own inside the polls, and now they predominate, but they don’t own it. And that has been very, very effective without changing a single law at securing elections all over the country. JT: Now, I know in Virginia, there’s requirements that election officials have balance in terms of their affiliations or whatever. But often we’ve found that election officials will be pulled from the Democrat side to backfill where Republicans are not available. I don’t know if that’s every state that has laws like that, Ken. KC: Not every state, but most states have something similar. But those fairness requirements do tend to exist everywhere, but they are also abused in many places. And that means that they’re skewed to the Left. JT: Has it gotten easier to find folks who are already putting down the newspaper with a picture of John Thune on the cover and the SAVE Act in the headline, grasping what it is that the Election Transparency Initiative does? KC: So, as you noted with our name, it isn’t hard to explain to people what we do, whether they want clean, crisp, clear elections, i.e. easy to vote, hard to cheat, or whether they want it all muddy and messy, which the Left tends to. And there’s really only one reason you might want insecure elections, and that’s because you want people to cheat because you think you’re going to benefit from it. And look, election cheating is as old as elections. I put up a post this morning on an article that literally two paragraphs, one after the other, about the California June primary. They rejected more mail-in ballots than ever before. Well, of the 150,000 rejected, 44,000 were rejected for signature mismatches. Well, why do signature mismatches happen? Well, maybe you’re getting old and your signature is trailing off, or maybe someone else is signing the ballot. And so, the next paragraph said, and election experts say, that mail-in ballot fraud is very rare. I mean, with a straight face, those things literally sat next to each other. And I can tell you, as a former prosecutor, that’s not one case of 44,000 signature falsifications, because of course, they are potential signature falsifications, but it’s awfully good starting evidence if you’re a prosecutor. But every single one of them has to be investigated independently. So, these election experts who’ve never spent a day in their life managing prosecutorial resources, it never occurs to any of them the incredible weight of manpower and resources that it would take just to investigate, forget prosecuting, just to investigate those 44,000 rather obvious instances of potential voter fraud, and then prosecuting whichever ones are appropriate to prosecute, however many that might be. And by the way, it’s cost efficient to secure elections on the front end. That’s why requiring voter ID, it isn’t just good for secure elections, it’s also efficient. It’s so much more efficient to stop fraud than to investigate and prosecute it. And frankly, much easier to do. JT: And that’s why the SAVE Act is so important to confirm citizenship on the front end, not wonder about it on the back end. KC: Yeah, because then you need a bunch of investigators digging around and looking for and following trails. JT: Do states need to devote more resources to elections as a grand scheme of things? Or they could just be more efficient? KC: To your question about putting more money in, they’re working people to death. Sure. And there is simply no reasonable basis for a 45-day election. It doesn’t exist. If you want people to have lots of opportunities to arrive and vote, etc. I mean, the most you could possibly defend is two weeks. As we saw in 2020, when in some places, they said, well, we’re done counting, everybody go home, and then they close doors, and they kept counting without oversight. So that that kind of consolidation and simplification saves money. It keeps people, Republicans, Democrats, libertarians, vegetarians from getting worn out in this process. JT: The mere suggestion of shortening the early voting windows is met with a chorus of “vote suppression, poll tax, Jim Crow,” And yet, if you look statistically, since we began in COVID, trying to find ways to keep people from all gathering together and voting in person, we’ve watched voter turnout decline across the country, even in presidential elections. KC: You’ll recall HR 1, the Democrats, Washington takeover of elections they tried to do in 2021 and 2022. An important person who testified was a guy named Bill Gardner. Bill Gardner was the longest serving secretary of state. And I believe in American history, he was New Hampshire’s Secretary of State, he was a Democrat. He testified to the exact point and he brought the data on voter turnout. New Hampshire is extremely limited in mail voting. They have a history of in person voting. And he compared it, for example, to Oregon, one of the first states to go all mail voting. And the turnout levels in Oregon compared to New Hampshire went down. And so, mail voting, the longer period of time is not increasing voter turnout. It might be easier in the sense that you don’t have to leave your house. But it’s more complicated in terms of the election system. Now, I will say, some states like Wisconsin don’t even open the envelopes, they don’t even begin the processing until election day. And it takes a long time to process each mail ballot, relative to just counting a vote of someone who shows up in person. This is why Florida, the third most populous state, can throw six million votes up on the board an hour after their polls close. Because they’ve done all their processing beforehand. And by the way, when you process beforehand, if you’re going to do mail in voting listeners, and you find a mistake, you can notify the voter, right, instead of their ballot going in the trash can. So, you actually get a curing opportunity that you don’t get in those states that don’t process before election day. That’s an interesting point on that. I agree with the president on mail and voting, it should be the old Virginia rule of if you can’t get to the polls on election day, or you’re too handicapped or aged or invalid or convalescent to get to the polls, you get to vote by mail. Otherwise, you vote in person. It’s also simpler, it’s cheaper, it’s more secure. Even Jimmy Carter in the Carter Baker Commission of 2005 identified mail in voting as the most insecure, mistake and fraud prone part of our elections. And that was 20 years ago on a bipartisan basis. JT: This is the expertise that is coming to bear now through the Heritage Foundation and their association with the Election Transparency Initiative. Is there a plan already in place for what’s next? Or is it just getting in touch with all the state networks that are already out there and saying, how can we help? KC: Well, we’re always doing that. And we’re always canvassing states, we do try to do quick turnaround support in state legislatures. Issues can arise, have legislation drafted, be voted on in days or weeks, things can happen very quickly. And we have always at ETI been nimble enough to jump in and support the local election integrity efforts very aggressively and very effectively. We can bring firepower and air cover that they just don’t have on their own. And with Heritage, we can do even more of that. And we can do it bigger and faster. And so that’s something that people should keep in mind and look for from the Election Transparency Initiative. Heritage Sentinels are going to be a tremendous relationship opportunity for us at ETI that give us essentially ears and eyes on the ground in every state because the Heritage Action Sentinel Program is already so substantial and developed. And, you know, that’s not a new exercise for them. They’ve been effective on a whole range of issues. But now we’re going to we’re going to bring a lot more manpower and experience to the election integrity issue. And with the help of Heritage Action, we’re going to make it easier to vote and harder to cheat. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

On Tuesday, three Republican candidates—Kim Farington, Bert Mizusawa, and David Williams—will be facing off to see who will earn the nomination to run against three-term incumbent Sen. Mark Warner in the race for a seat in the U.S. Senate. Warner is unopposed on the Democratic side after potential challenger Mark Moran decided to run as an independent. Moran was barred this year from using the wagering platform Kalshi after he placed a bet on his own candidacy. He said that he “wanted to get caught.” Primary day in the commonwealth is Aug. 4. Joe Thomas of the Daily Signal spoke with two of the GOP contenders recently. “I truly believe that this is going to be a referendum, not only on Mark Warner, but also on [Gov. Abigail] Spanberger, who is one of the lowest-ranking governors at this time in her term,” Williams told the Daily Signal. He added that lawmakers aren’t working hard enough to solve important problems. “Sen. Warner voted 13 times to shut down the government and then went on vacation, and those are the type of things that Virginians are frustrated with.” Farington also targeted Warner. “I don’t have to prove he’s out of touch. He is proving to Virginians himself that he is so out of touch with his constituents,” she told Thomas. “He cannot relate to the government employees. He shut down the government, using them as a political pawn—the government contractors as well, the small businesses. He is so out of touch with reality, with the real issues that Virginians are facing.” Farington promised to provide accountability and transparency if elected, including making changes to the budget process. Mizusawa, a retired Army major general, spoke recently to Charlottesville Tomorrow, where he focused on what he would do to put America first and defend constitutional principles. “Congress has a responsibility to fulfill its constitutional duties regardless of which party controls the White House,” he told the news outlet. “The Constitution and existing federal law clearly define the scope and limits of presidential authority, and each branch of government should remain within those boundaries. My focus will be on working with President Trump to advance an America First agenda that strengthens our country and delivers results for Virginians.” There are also House primaries in a few of the state’s 11 districts. There are Republican primaries in the 10th, 7th, and 5th districts and Democratic primaries in the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 8th, and 9th districts. Democrats currently hold both U.S. Senate seats and six of Virginia’s 11 House seats. Congressional district lines remain unchanged from the 2024 election, although this year’s primaries were delayed for several months by a Democrat-led proposal to redistrict this year. The Virginia Supreme Court invalidated the results of April’s constitutional amendment redistricting referendum, which passed with 52% of the vote. While early voting wraps up on Saturday, voters aren’t showing up as they have in recent elections. Through Sunday, fewer than 40,000 people had cast ballots in the Republican primary, far fewer than at this point in 2024, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. It found that early turnout is also down on the Democrat side, with roughly 68,000 votes cast compared to 120,000 two years ago.