Democrat Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed dodged a question about his past comment on the death of the former Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after being pressed on the issue by CNN host Jake Tapper. According to a video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed told campaign staff the day after Khamenei’s death that he did not want to comment because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today.” A 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 44% of American Muslims support Hamas, Iran’s funded terror proxy responsible for the mass rape, kidnapping, and slaughter of Israeli civilians. During the CNN interview, Tapper noted Khamenei’s record and asked why El-Sayed was concerned about offending people mourning the Iranian leader. Approximately 55% of the 110,000 residents in Dearborn are Muslim. Rather than answer, El-Sayed shifted the discussion to U.S. involvement in the conflict, arguing Americans should be focusing on the deaths of two U.S. servicemembers and questioning the decision to enter the war. “I didn’t want to comment on it then because it’s a ridiculous pretext,” El-Sayed said, criticizing the costs of the conflict and arguing it should never have been fought. Tapper reiterated that his question concerned El-Sayed’s comments about potentially offending residents of Dearborn. The host moved on before El-Sayed ever directly addressed the point. When @jaketapper presses @AbdulElSayed over his refusal to comment on the death of the supreme leader of the Iranian terror regime because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” El-Sayed again refuses to comment on the Ayatollah’s death pic.twitter.com/cCEQTGpAwR— Jesse Arm (@Jesse_Leg) July 19, 2026 El-Sayed declined the Daily Signal’s request to comment. El-Sayed’s remarks mirror those of other Democrats, such as Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who voted against designating Iran a state sponsor of terrorism. Recently, Omar introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would protect congressionally designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, such as Iran, and Iran’s militias Hamas and Hezbollah, from “military action.”

Like many young men in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I became interested in current events, news, and commentary. Familiarizing myself with both the conservative and liberal journalists of the day forced me to think seriously about the issues facing the nation. I enjoyed the exercise.  In those formative years, I came across a syndicated columnist whose work resonated with me more than the rest. He soon became my North Star for navigating politics and policy.  Sadly, years later, my North Star went crazy, like so many other commentators. These previously thoughtful writers met Trump’s run with mockery and disdain. Reading between the lines, it was clear to me that their decades in Washington had made them territorial; they saw Trump as a lowly trespasser.  Media criticism of Trump—both conservative and liberal—amounted to resentment. The critics demanded that Trump seek their approval, or at least acknowledge their gatekeeper status. Trump wasn’t willing to abide by the rules of the Beltway power structure, an insular ecosystem that the journalist and commentary class helped create and lived comfortably within.  Trump flipped the script on this Beltway political establishment. He won in 2016 because in the eyes of everyday Americans, the old guard had become too comfortable. There was hardly any discernible daylight between Democrats and Republicans.  Media commentary became mere obligation. Partisan debate was a tradition for tradition’s sake. Meanwhile, real public policy decisions shifted away from the interests of the American people.   Diversity of thought has essentially disappeared from the commentary class. Leftist elitists and their regime media abhor any thought that veers from their worldview. The Swamp and its media have forced the public to pick a side. The choice is simple: the elite’s side or the side they characterize as the morally and intellectually bankrupt. Thankfully, some people are seeing the light. Bill Maher is perhaps the best-known liberal who consistently calls out his own people on this point.  As an old head, now having been involved in politics in some way for 38 years, I have a new North Star: John Solomon. He is an investigative journalist who spent most of his career working in the mainstream (regime) media. His resume boasts 20 years with Associated Press, stints at the Washington Post, collaboration with 60 Minutes, and a senior position at The Hill.  Solomon made a career out of questioning and investigating government decisions and behavior. He was highly regarded by his peers and received many awards for his investigative work, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Society of Professional Journalists National Investigative Award.  After the election of Trump, he suddenly became an outcast among these same peers. His sin? He dug into the legitimacy of the Russia collusion narrative and the Mueller investigation. Solomon’s commitment to truth had not changed. He had always had a consistent approach—which included questioning the government’s behavior, no matter who was in power. But any attempt to give Trump—the trespasser, the usurper—a fair shake in the press was deemed to be the ultimate betrayal.  In time, Solomon’s trailblazing investigative work has been vindicated. He founded Just The News in 2020 after it became clear that authentic investigative journalism was no longer welcomed within his profession.  Solomon is an investigative journalist. Today, he is widely considered a right-wing voice, but only because he stayed true to his profession while that profession turned into a leftist ideological camp.  It seems that CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss, tasked with trying to restore some semblance of objective journalism to the network, understands Solomon’s work. He was recently interviewed on the network.  The interview would appall members of the regime media. In it, he shared facts that have been ignored and censored, meaning they had never been heard by most of the American public before.  John Solomon: Pay attention to what this guy is reporting, and you’ll never get lost.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The World Cup arrived. With it came millions of visitors from across the globe descending on American cities. They come for the soccer, sure. But while here they discover something more—the kind of abundance that is easy to take for granted if you were born here. Walk through any American host city, and you’ll see foreign fans posting videos in stunned delight. They talk about the food—enormous portions, every cuisine imaginable, available at midnight. They discover air conditioning, blasting gloriously in July. They experience the highways, the skylines, and the relentless commercial energy of a country that built itself on the premise that more is possible. Many of these visitors come from wealthy, developed nations. And yet, even they are struck by a realization: America is different, and that difference is worth protecting. Nowhere is that truer than in medicine. While fans from the U.K., France, Germany, and Spain enjoy American hospitality, many are also quietly relieved to be somewhere with a functioning health care system. Because back home, the cracks are widening into chasms. In the U.K., the National Health Service has become a symbol not of compassionate coverage, but of waiting. Waiting for a GP appointment. Waiting for a specialist. Waiting for surgery. Waiting, in too many tragic cases, until it is too late. NHS waiting lists have ballooned to over seven million cases. Patients with cancer, heart disease, and other serious conditions are routinely delayed for months. Some die before their number is called. According to one study from a British think tank, “between September 2024 and August 2025, around 79,130 names were removed from NHS waiting lists across 127 acute trusts because patients had died before reaching the front of the queue. Of those, 28,908 had been waiting longer than the 18-week statutory standard, and 7,737 had waited more than a year.” But it isn’t just the U.K. Across Europe, a different and equally damning problem has emerged: Patients can’t access breakthrough treatments even after regulators approve them. A new study from Germany’s WifOR Institute and Columbia University economist Frank Lichtenberg examined medicines for cancer, diabetes, and respiratory disease across 29 European countries from 2014 to 2022. The findings are stark. Separate data from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations shows that once a drug is approved in Europe, it now takes an average of 597 days, nearly 20 months, before patients can actually access it. That’s up from 504 days in 2019. The gap is growing, not shrinking. Nearly two years. That is how long a European cancer patient may wait after a drug is approved before it becomes available to them. In many cases, that is the difference between life and death. Meanwhile, in the U.S., FDA-approved drugs typically reach patients in a fraction of that time. America’s system, for all its genuine imperfections and real affordability challenges, is a place where innovation arrives faster; where patients can fight for coverage of cutting-edge treatments; where doctors and patients, not government bureaucrats managing a national budget, make decisions about care. This is not an argument against reform. American health care has real problems that deserve serious attention, including cost, transparency, and administrative burden. But the answer to those problems is not to import the European model, a model that is demonstrably failing the people it was designed to serve. Yet that is precisely what some state legislatures are beginning to flirt with. Single-payer proposals, government-run coverage expansions, and price-control schemes modeled on European frameworks are making their way through statehouses across the country. Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington have enacted “Prescription Drug Affordability Boards” or similar drug-affordability review entities. Some of these are able to implement MFN-style price controls. Other states considering their own iterations. New York is considering a single-payer healthcare bill, while California lawmakers have repeatedly introduced single-payer proposals as recently as this year. Proponents promise European-style universality without European-style consequences. They are wrong. The consequences follow the model. Price controls reduce investment in new therapies. Centralized systems create bottlenecks. Bureaucratic approval layers add delays. The 597-day wait discussed above is a feature of what happens when governments control access to care. The World Cup visitors snapping photos of American abundance will go home soon. They’ll tell their friends about the food, the heat, the spectacle. Some will quietly mention that they also visited a walk-in clinic, promptly, without an appointment, for a reasonable fee, and were seen by a doctor the same afternoon. That story doesn’t make international headlines. But it should. American health care’s greatest asset is the underlying architecture of a system that still rewards speed, innovation, and patient access. That architecture is what’s at stake when state legislators reach for European blueprints. The fans know what they found here. Let’s not give it away. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Dr. Chris Fall, the director of the Commerce Department’s safety-centered artificial intelligence organization, has resigned, two sources familiar with the matter told the Daily Signal. Fall, who served in the first Trump administration at the Department of Energy as the director of the Office of Science, was tapped to lead the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation in late April. “Following Chris’s departure, NIST Director Dr. Arvind Raman will continue to oversee CAISI and will serve as Acting CAISI Director,” a commerce spokesperson told the Daily Signal. The Trump administration had initially picked Collin Burns, a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, to lead CAISI, but while Burns was in the onboarding process, the Commerce Department selected Fall to lead the organization, the Daily Signal reported. Fall resigned after only about three months in the role. This comes after the Commerce Department imposed export controls on Anthropic’s new models due to concerns about offensive cyber capabilities. The agency lifted the export controls after about two weeks. Anthropic said at the time that researchers from CAISI had “tested both our prior and new safeguards and agree that they are extraordinarily strong.”

Hawaii’s most recent Second Amendment defeat at the U.S. Supreme Court was both a major victory for the right to bear arms and entirely predictable. Since the court’s landmark decision four years ago in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Hawaii’s anti-gun lawmakers had been trying to accomplish what Bruen had already forbidden: preventing ordinary, law-abiding citizens from carrying a firearm in public for self-defense. Their tool of choice became known as the “vampire rule,” an absurd legal contrivance stipulating that licensed concealed-carry permit holders couldn’t carry onto private property open to the public unless the property owner had first given express permission. The state compounded that restriction by designating an expansive list of so-called “sensitive places” where carry was also prohibited, from parks and beaches to government buildings and restaurants serving alcohol.  For the past four years, Hawaii effectively annulled the right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense by turning many of the places people visit every day into prohibited locations. But on June 25, 2026, the Supreme Court rejected that effort in no uncertain terms.  In Wolford v. Lopez, the Court held that Hawaii’s attempt to treat nearly every publicly accessible private business as presumptively off-limits to licensed carry violated the Second and 14th Amendments.  Americans spend much of their day on private property that is open to the public, and that’s precisely why Hawaii’s law was so egregious. They stop for gas, buy groceries, pick up prescriptions, grab coffee, meet friends for dinner, and run countless other errands without giving a second thought to whether the building they are entering is privately owned. Under Hawaii’s law, every one of those routine stops could expose licensed citizens—people who had passed background checks, completed training, and satisfied every red-tape requirement the state has imposed—to criminal penalties unless a business owner had affirmatively granted permission. Meanwhile, dangerous violent criminals were unlikely to concern themselves with such lawful-carry considerations, greatly endangering the residents of Hawaii. The people most affected by these restrictions were always going to be law-abiding citizens—rendered defenseless by the state.  Hawaii’s approach also conscripted thousands of business owners into a political debate many had no interest in joining. Private property owners have always been free to prohibit firearms on their premises if they choose, and nothing in Wolford changes that.  Hawaii erred in trying to reverse this commonsense default. Rather than allowing each proprietor to decide whether to exclude firearms, the state presumed lawful carry was forbidden unless the owner affirmatively opted in. Restaurant owners, shopkeepers, and other small-business operators were forced to signal a position on one of the country’s most contentious political issues simply to operate their businesses. At the end of the day, Hawaii’s dangerous and misguided law ultimately failed because it rested on the absurd premise that citizens must first obtain someone else’s permission before exercising a constitutional right. Bruen first rejected that premise in 2022. Wolford rejected it again.  Hawaii’s lawmakers may have convinced themselves they had found a clever workaround to Bruen, but all they really did was repackage the same unconstitutional restriction in different legalese, and the Supreme Court saw right through it.  Lawmakers in California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and anywhere else that has considered or is considering similar restrictions should take note. The Supreme Court has now made abundantly clear that law-abiding Americans cannot be treated as second-class citizens when exercising their constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense. Anti-gun lawmakers may not like that answer, but after Bruen and now Wolford, they can no longer pretend it is an unsettled one. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.