Amid celebrations of our nation’s 250th birthday, Gallup serves up a sobering portrait of general dissatisfaction with our nation’s core institutions.  “Confidence in U.S. institutions Remains Near All-Time Low,” reports Gallup.   Of 14 core institutions—banks, big business, labor, the presidency, Congress, schools, health care, etc.—only 27% say they have “a great deal/quite a lot of confidence,” one point above the all-time low for this average.  In 1979, the percentage expressing “a great deal/quite a lot of confidence” in these 14 core institutions stood at 48%.  One explanation is the double-edged sword of the growth of government. More government means more inefficiency. At the same time, the more government control grows, the harder it is to change and reform. More government, more interest groups, more lobbying to keep the status quo.   Let’s consider education.   Per Gallup, only 27% say they have high confidence in our public schools. The highest it’s been since 1993 was 41%.  Any marketplace in which three-quarters of consumers are unhappy with the product they’re getting would see intense activity by suppliers to change what they are delivering. That’s when the marketplace is free.  But when the market is dominated by government and unions, the best interests of the consumer—in the case of education, parents and children—do not rule. Powerful interest groups that profit from the status quo use money and power to block change.  When only 27% are satisfied with our public schools, how can we possibly understand that only 28 states have opted in to the new Education Freedom $1,700 federal tax credit to contribute to scholarship funds to help parents privately educate their children?  The answer is 25 of the 28 states that have opted in are Republican states. Democrats are subservient to the hundreds of millions of political contributions from the teachers’ unions and their agenda to indoctrinate our kids with progressive values.  The results—pathetic test scores—speak for themselves.  But now we can see what happens when governors really care about children and families, put learning as their priority, and let the marketplace work to give parents freedom to choose what they see as best for their kids.   Under the leadership of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas set up its Education Freedom Accounts program, establishing a platform through which parents have available scholarship funding to use to choose where to send their children to school.   Data is now coming in for the program, now in its second year.   Per a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, students participating in the Education Freedom Account program “outperformed nearly 60% of students nationwide in math and English on standardized assessments.”  Further, per the report, there are almost 50,000 students now using these accounts and 81% of K-12 parents support the program—up 20 points from 2023.  The Education Freedom Accounts provided $6,684-$7,627 to each student for educational expenses.  Blue New York state has not opted in to the Education Freedom Tax Credit.  Investor Jeff Yass noted in the Wall Street Journal that, despite New York City spending $42,000 per student in its public schools, scores in math and reading are dismal.   Yass suggests to New York City socialist mayor Mamdani that the $42,000 be split in half, giving a scholarship voucher worth $21,000 for each child and the other $21,000 into a savings account in the child’s name. After 13 years, when the child graduates high school, there would be $300,000 accumulated—assuming a paltry 2% annual interest rate—for college.   We celebrate America’s 250th birthday with joy, even though a lot is not what it should or could be.   Freedom is precious and magnificent because it leaves the door perpetually open for renewal.   One party, Democrats, thinks that freedom is the problem.  Republicans know that freedom is the answer.  Young new Republican leaders such as Sanders are shining examples of the great potential ahead. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

Speaker Mike Johnson pulled off another unlikely feat getting a divided Republican conference to pass a bill providing Iran war funding and supporting state voter ID requirements. This time, he had a hand from Vice President JD Vance, who worked the phones behind the scenes to get skeptical conservative members on board, sources familiar with the matter tell the Daily Signal.  Overcoming numerous divisions within the conference, House Republicans on Wednesday successfully passed a framework for reconciliation 3.0, which included $95 billion in spending for the Iran war and parts of the SAVE America Act.  The Senate’s process of reconciliation, used for certain budget-related items, bypasses the filibuster, requiring only a simple majority vote for passage instead of the usual 60 votes. Several fiscal hawks in the House raised concerns that the bill did not include pay-fors for the massive spending on the Iran war.  While conservatives were enthusiastic about passing parts of the SAVE America Act, they feared the provisions would offer only optional funding to states that agree to require voter ID and ban mail-in ballots, not changes to blue-state election policies.  However, Vance called several members and reassured them the White House was serious about passing the full SAVE America Act, not a watered-down, optional version, the senior House staffer told the Daily Signal.  Vance also held a private meeting with members on July 15 to answer their questions about the bill.  According to Main Street Caucus Chair Mike Flood, R-Neb., White House Office of Legislative Counsel Director James Braid was responsible for helping the House understand the vision behind the reconciliation push. Braid spoke at the Main Street member meeting last Monday. “The White House did their job, our leadership did their job, and the caucuses did their job,” he said.  Originally, the reconciliation 3.0 bill was supposed to fund the Iran war and cut wasteful spending to pay for it. However, Braid explained that this couldn’t pass the Senate, so the direction of the bill needed to be adjusted.  “We had to write a bill that would be tough to turn down in the Senate, and if we made it complicated,” Flood said, “I have no doubt that it would just lay on the Senate floor and go nowhere.” Flood doesn’t think the bill could have passed without the White House’s involvement. He says the House “couldn’t have had a better week.” “I don’t think this would have gotten off the ground in the House without the White House’s involvement,” he said. “Every time they choose to provide leadership on something this big, it makes the process work a lot better, especially when you’ve got 220 different ideas about how to approach it.” Now, President Donald Trump is urging the Senate to quickly complete the job. “I am asking that the Senate adopt a Budget Resolution, which can pass with a simple Majority, before leaving for the August recess,” Trump said on Truth Social Friday. “We are ready to work side-by-side with the Senate to get this done for the American People!”

The last Democrat candidate to appeal to the white working-class voter was former President Bill Clinton. He needed every one of those voters in his 1992 and 1996 races. Yet he still failed to win 50% of the popular vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy.  Since then, the Democrat brand has lost the white working-class vote in nearly every presidential election. Yet this demographic still makes up 40% of the electorate and registers and votes at much higher rates than non-white groups.  Apparently, during the Biden-era influx of 10 million illegal aliens, Democrats really believed their own slogans about an “Emerging Democratic Majority” and how “Demography is destiny.” They therefore confidently abandoned most efforts to recruit white working-class voters.  In 2017, the then-neocon—and now leftist Zohran Mamdani supporter—Bill Kristol (who has advocated abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement altogether) spoke of the need to open the borders to replace the “lazy” American worker: “Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?”  Kristol then characterized this apparently dispensable group as “decadent, lazy, spoiled.”  And yet, until the novelty of Barack Obama’s candidacy and the demographic overconfidence it inspired, Democrats regularly lamented that, aside from the moderate Bill Clinton interlude, their steady leftward turn was becoming both irreversible and electorally costly.  Indeed, Obama aside, conventional Democrat wisdom apparently held that a presidential nominee, regardless of his politics, should have a Southern accent to project authenticity and appeal to working-class whites. Thus, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore all won the popular vote.  By contrast, Northern liberals, who lacked Obama’s singular advantage of being the first black president, only confirmed that Democrats had lost the support of working-class whites. Witness the defeats of Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and even Kamala Harris.  The charismatic Obama, as the first black president, and the wax-museum blue-collar construct of “good old Joe Biden from Scranton” are merely the exceptions that prove the rule.  Toxic Agendas These trends have only accelerated with the top-down takeover of the Democratic Party by hardcore leftists, socialists, and even the occasional communist.  Their agendas are boutique and have little appeal outside blue-city and blue-state echo chambers.  In the proverbial real world, voters have little patience with redefining what a woman is, biological men showering with teen girls, or males masquerading as female athletes stealing girls’ medals. Open borders, mass amnesties, defunding ICE and the police, and romanticizing illegal aliens are likewise 30-70 losing issues.  Working people do not understand the banning of natural gas stoves or the subsidizing of wind and solar power while phasing out fossil fuels. Nor do they like the idea of losers suddenly wishing to change the system through 70% mail-in voting, no-ID voting, packing the court, destroying the Electoral College, and ending the filibuster—much less socialist talk of abolishing the Senate and the presidency.  No-cash bail, revolving-door arrests and releases, early prison releases, abortion on demand until the moment of birth, and climate-change fanaticism are equally mystifying to the working class.  Democrat Oligarchs, Millionaires, and Billionaires  Working-class voters are not stupid, as left-wing elites assume. They know that the Left, for all its bombast about oligarchs, millionaires, and billionaires, is the party of precisely those groups—big-money interests from Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the legal profession, the media, and Wall Street.  Lavish giving to the Left has been exemplified by MacKenzie Scott, Jeffrey Epstein, Sam Bankman-Fried, Melinda Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reid Hoffman, Neville Roy Singham, and, of course, George Soros in his many manifestations. It is no accident that none of these left-wing billionaires made their fortunes by building tangible products but rather through divorce settlements, financial speculation, or social media.  The rise of the new socialists has only added another layer of hypocrisy to the Left’s preexisting elitism and dependence on big money, creating what Andrew Stiles has characterized as “Trust-Fund Socialism.”  What the new hard-left redistributionists Ro Khanna, Mamdani, Hasan Piker, and Graham Platner share are privileged upbringings, subsidized lifestyles, and prolonged adolescence sustained by parental support—all of which make their supposedly populist appeals to “fairness” ring hollow.  When Mamdani talks of “calloused hands,” we know he knows little about physical labor as the privileged child of “settler colonialists” in Uganda. Indeed, although his Indian immigrant community makes up less than 1% of the population, it accounts for 65% of that African nation’s total tax revenue, and the Mamdani family enjoys a getaway estate on Lake Victoria.  Pajama Boys and DEI The new socialists do not employ any volatile, cranky Southern populist advisors like James Carville or seasoned campaign strategists like Mark Penn or Doug Schoen, who sought to win over the working class.  Instead, the new democratic socialists seem to gravitate to nepo-baby handlers and silver-spoon nerds who oddly seem to speak through their noses as would-be kingmakers—as the recent clips of the trust-funded pajama boys Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff attest.  But the Democrats’ unicorn hunt for the lost—and now almost mythical—white working-class male voter is stymied not only by the off-putting democratic socialist agenda but also by the top-down, talk-down elitism of its emissaries.  DEI plays a considerable role as well.  The Obama administration‘s creation of a new “oppressed” class comprising roughly 30% of the nation, set against a supposedly 70% white “oppressor” class, infuriated the white working class.  Suddenly, the old black-white racial binary of affirmative action disappeared, along with the idea of helping statistically poorer blacks. It was replaced by a new, much broader category of “non-white,” which had nothing to do with class.  Those classified as the victimized DEI 30% were often wealthy, privileged, and drawn from ethnic groups whose per capita incomes exceeded those of whites.  Whiteness on the Brain  Indeed, to normal people, the four-mansion-owning, private-jet-flying Obamas dropping in to lecture Americans about “equity” and “fairness,” or to complain about “raising the bar,” seemed absurd. It reaffirmed Obama’s infamous “clingers” remark. That slur foreshadowed a cascade of Democrat insults aimed at white working-class Trump voters, who were variously branded as irredeemables, deplorables, dregs, chumps, semi-fascists, and garbage.  Whether it was the prep-schooled prima donna Jasmine Crockett spouting off about “white men,” the lavishly living Mamdani talking about going after “whiter neighborhoods,” or the multimillionaires Whoopi Goldberg and Sunny Hostin on “The View” lecturing America on systemic racism, DEI became a Democratic IED. It seemed to detonate whenever a privileged “person of color” launched into the accustomed anti-white racial rant without “checking their own privilege” first.  The new batch of socialist candidates only confirms how deeply embedded this racially fueled hostility toward the white working class has become within the Democratic Party.  Darializa Avila Chevalier, the New York congressional nominee, blasted white women as “ugly colonizer women.”  Aber Kawas, a New York State Senate candidate, blamed 9/11 on “capitalism and racism and white supremacy.”  Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, shortly before the George Floyd riots, declared, “White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus [of racism]. But we spread it wherever we go.”  Melat Kiros warned that “we were never really going to be able to tackle white supremacy in the way that we need to without reparations.” So spoke the Colorado Democrat congressional candidate and Ethiopian immigrant to the United States, who ascended into elite circles as a corporate lawyer and now as a perpetual Ph.D. gadfly.  Working-Class Cutouts  So, here are the Democrats’ dilemmas:  1. White working-class voters without college degrees still comprise nearly 40% of all registered voters. In 2024, they backed President Donald Trump by a 66-34 margin. That reality means that any further Democrat hemorrhaging among Hispanic and black middle-class voters will be fatal—as it was in 2024.  2. The mainstream Democrat agenda alienates the white working class because it is tailored to affluent urban voters, with its emphasis on climate change, trans issues, illegal immigration, radically expansive abortion rights, anti-military sentiment, DEI, and defunding law enforcement.  3. The new socialists are most comfortable among wealthy leftist leaders who wish to take over the Democratic Party, talk down to the white working class, and pontificate about how awful the U.S. is.  So, since Democrats need the white working class to regain power, yet both loathe and mock it, what is the radical Left to do?  Presto: invent a white working-class leftist.  So, Democrats produced the unvetted madman Platner, complete with a Nazi tattoo, a violently misogynistic past, antisemitism, and a phony working-class oysterman persona.  Then came Talarico, the “next Beto O’Rourke,” supposedly destined to win a Texas Senate seat. The hard Left’s “good” evangelical Christian was likewise expected to win over the once-despised churchgoing Southern white voter.  Except Talarico is also inauthentic. His past quotes and social media posts portray a curiosity whose earlier record is apparently off-limits and who seems obsessed with justice for gays and trans people—but from whom?  Of course—from the allegedly illiberal, wicked white working class he now courts.  And does anyone remember the roly-poly, hyperactive “working man,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (who just pardoned a serial child rapist)? He was picked as the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee not because he empowered Somali welfare fraud, disparaged the white working class, or embellished his resume, but because he could supposedly change the oil in his pickup and had a shotgun.  In 2024, we heard ad nauseam the efforts of his running mate, Kamala Harris—the privileged child of two PhDs, former companion of political fixer Willie Brown, and longtime Brentwood resident—to portray herself as “middle class.”  We were told the unverifiable tale that she had worked at McDonald’s (asking where or when was taboo) and owned a Glock semi-automatic pistol (when and where she bought it remained a mystery). The Berkeleyite was soon reborn as a longtime resident of the nearby but decidedly less upper-middle-class Oakland.  Looking ahead to 2028, will the socialists try to recast the upper-middle-class professional Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a working-class sister to the white working class? Or reboot Harris, this time perhaps with a Smith & Wesson revolver and a previous stint at Wendy’s?  There are even fewer plausible candidates for the Great Leftist Working-Class Hope. Pete Buttigieg—the homosexual former South Bend, Indiana, mayor, ex-Wall Street consultant, and failed presidential candidate—came across in the 2020 primaries and later as transportation secretary in the Biden administration as arrogant, sanctimonious, self-referential, and contrived.  But now he sports a beard and stops in at workingmen’s cafes, achieving precisely the opposite effect of what was intended.  Then there is Gavin Newsom, the nepo-baby populist, with his $9 million estate, boutique businesses, and lifelong subsidies from oil heir Gordon Getty.  Without a hair out of place, wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch vest while shoveling cinders after the latest trademark California wildfire, even he is trying to convince voters in Akron and Grand Rapids that Gavin is one with the working man as he declares capitalism a failure.  It’s the Message, Not the Medium The question is not ultimately one of class, but of authenticity.  Whatever the Left may say about Trump, it consistently attacks his “crass” tastes and appearance—his chrysophilia, love of mixed martial arts and professional wrestling, comb-over, orange complexion, and Queens accent—but not the authenticity of any of those preferences. Trump’s takeout meals from McDonald’s are not staged but a long-standing habit.  Billionaire Trump wears his customary blue suit, red tie, and wingtips in every setting, on every occasion, and in every kind of weather. He does not perch on straw bales wearing a John Deere cap, affect a regional accent à la Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, or don blue jeans and work boots to “bond” with farmers. He is as out of place walking an assembly line as he is genuinely appealing to those who work there.  Why? His agenda is tailored to working-class tastes. He doesn’t care about race. In our 2026 America, that opposition to tribalism takes the form of refusing to gratuitously pander to the DEI industry.  The final paradox?  The Left needs to win a lot more white working-class Trump voters. Yet, in their AstroTurf efforts, they ridicule Trump for his very tastes and appeal, which they try in vain to inauthentically emulate.  (C)2026 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s descent from its once-vaunted role as a sentinel against extremism has been precipitous and ironic. An organization whose “hate map” promiscuously equates parental rights groups such as Moms for Liberty with neo-Nazi organizations now stands indicted by the Department of Justice on charges of wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Federal prosecutors allege that, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled millions of donor dollars—more than $4 million by some accounts—to individuals associated with the very groups it professed to combat, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and National Socialist outfits. Prepaid credit cards and shell accounts, it is said, facilitated this curious philanthropy. To the disinterested observer, such revelations ought to suffice as a final discreditation. Yet portions of Corporate America remain stubbornly unpersuaded. Many large firms continue to rely on Benevity, a Canadian “corporate social responsibility” software provider, for employee charitable matching and donation programs. Benevity’s platform has deployed the SPLC’s tendentious diagnostic tools—including its notorious hate map—to screen and redirect contributions away from conservative and religious nonprofits. During the most recent proxy season, we at The Heritage Foundation discovered precisely this pattern while engaging with portfolio companies. The corporate representatives we engaged with claimed to be unaware that their charitable-giving infrastructure was, through Benevity, quietly blacklisting organizations such as the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty, and the Alliance Defending Freedom. When Heritage raised the issue in shareholder discussions with companies including Mastercard, Meta, and Salesforce, the investor-relations teams expressed appreciation for the clarification. They promptly addressed the matter with Benevity, and we withdrew our shareholder proposals once the issue was resolved. These quiet victories illustrate both the problem’s pervasiveness and the efficacy of informed engagement. Yet they also underscore a broader failure: corporate stewards, in unwittingly outsourcing moral judgments to a discredited partisan actor, have permitted viewpoint discrimination to infiltrate the ostensibly neutral machinery of philanthropy. At a minimum, this raises the specter of a breach of duty to make fully informed business decisions. The Department of Justice’s indictment has exposed the SPLC as an institution undeserving of corporate reliance or largesse. Firms that persist in donating to it must answer to their shareholders (and stakeholders) why they continue to support an organization alleged to have funded the Ku Klux Klan. Even more pressing is the removal of the SPLC’s discredited “tools” for identifying so-called hate groups. A cottage industry of third-party providers has arisen around these materials, enabling discrimination against conservative and religious organizations and impairing their fundraising. Many corporations outsource charitable decisions, but the hypocrisy of relying on metrics from an entity now accused of subsidizing the extremism it once purported to dismantle defeats any claim to genuine social responsibility. The irony is particularly striking: An organization that allegedly funded actual hate groups has supplied the very criteria by which to exclude houses of worship and pro-family groups on the basis that they were supposedly fomenting racial hatred. This normalized discrimination has not gone unnoticed. Major asset managers such as Fidelity Investments and Vanguard have recently blocked or restricted donor-advised fund contributions to the SPLC in the wake of the federal charges. Coalitions such as the 1792 Exchange, alongside organizations including Turning Point USA, Focus on the Family, PragerU, and the Center for Christian Virtue, are pressing corporations to uphold the American principles of free expression and nondiscrimination. While Corporate America has begun retreating from the more overt excesses of the DEI and ESG enthusiasms that marked the “Great Awokening” of 2020, the embedded presence of SPLC materials in corporate infrastructure reveals how much work remains. Screening out conservative and religious organizations from employee matching programs should be anathema to any corporation professing fidelity to founding principles. Conservatives should take heart that this hypocrisy is now under sustained challenge—from the Department of Justice on the legal front and from shareholder and advocacy efforts on the outside. Removing corporate reliance on SPLC materials and ending donations to a race-hustling enterprise would mark a welcome restoration of intellectual honesty and neutrality in American business. The unglamorous reign of the SPLC as self-appointed arbiter of morality deserves a decisive end.

Hollywood has rediscovered Homer. It is time America’s schools did the same. Christopher Nolan’s film “The Odyssey” opened with ticket sales of $264.1 million worldwide, including $124.5 million in the United States and Canada. Half its domestic audience was between 18 and 34 years old. That’s no small achievement for a story composed nearly 3,000 years ago. Not surprisingly, some casting choices bear the imprint of Hollywood’s obsession with imposing contemporary progressivism on the past. But the film’s success has nonetheless created a remarkable opportunity for conservatives. Millions of people, many of them young, are suddenly talking about Odysseus, Penelope, Ithaca, and Troy. More importantly, they are reaching for the original. Publishers Weekly, citing Circana BookScan, reported that print sales of Homer’s “Odyssey” have risen 76% this year. Conservatives should seize this moment to press for something more important than another cinematic blockbuster: the revival of classical education in America’s schools. For decades, the educational establishment has pushed aside the great works underpinning Western civilization. Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, and America’s Founders are too often treated as relics of an unenlightened past, useful mainly as targets for criticism. In their place, students are offered ideology masquerading as education. They are encouraged to view history chiefly through race, gender, and oppression, and to distrust the civilization they inherited before even learning what it contains. A genuine education does not tell students what to think. It teaches them how to think by introducing them to questions mankind has wrestled with for thousands of years: What is justice? What do we owe our families and our country? What is courage? When must desire give way to duty? “The Odyssey” endures because it confronts such questions. Odysseus is intelligent but flawed, courageous but repeatedly tempted. He seeks to return not merely to a place, but to his home, his wife, his son and the kingdom for which he bears responsibility. Some of his greatest battles are against his own pride, appetite, and weakness. Classical education places such truths at the center of learning. It emphasizes close reading, reasoned argument, history, logic, and rhetoric. It challenges students to confront great ideas rather than memorize fashionable slogans. It also promotes something many schools have forgotten: Education is about forming character as well as imparting information. John Adams understood this well. On May 18, 1781, he wrote from Amsterdam to his son John Quincy, who was not yet 14. Along with Dutch, the younger Adams was immersed in Latin and the classics. “All the End of Study is to make you a good Man and a useful Citizen,” Adams told him. That sentence captures what education was meant to achieve in the early republic: cultivating the judgment and virtue needed to preserve a free society. This does not mean replacing progressive indoctrination with conservative indoctrination. The goal is to cultivate minds capable of distinguishing assertion from argument and passing trends from enduring wisdom. Fortunately, Americans are responding. According to the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, drawing on Arcadia Education data, classical education now encompasses more than 1,500 public, private, and charter schools serving nearly 700,000 students. It is projected to reach roughly 2,600 schools and more than one million students by 2035. Between 2019 and 2023 alone, 264 new classical schools opened nationwide. That growth is encouraging, but nowhere near enough. A free society cannot long survive when its future citizens do not understand its history, institutions, or the responsibilities of liberty. Classical education is not nostalgia, nor does it require pretending that Western civilization has never fallen short. The West has made mistakes. But it also developed the principles that enabled those mistakes to be recognized and corrected: reason, natural law, equality before the law, and ordered liberty. That is why progressives are determined to sever young Americans from their civilizational inheritance. A student who has read Plato, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Federalist Papers, and Abraham Lincoln is harder to manipulate than one whose knowledge of history begins with social media. Parents, school boards, and lawmakers should use the excitement surrounding Nolan’s film to promote classical schools, expand school choice, and restore the great books to curricula. Schools should invite students not merely to watch “The Odyssey,” but to read it, debate it, and consider what its lessons demand of them. Hollywood has reminded America that the classics can still capture the public imagination. Now our schools must rediscover their power to shape minds and form character. For if the West is to endure, its children must first understand what they have inherited.