Who caused unaffordability? Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism. Yet annual inflation during former President Joe Biden’s four years averaged almost 5%. It peaked at over 9%, while prices for some key staples rose by 30% over his tenure—all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9%. In his second term, it averaged 2.6% in 2025—and may rise to 4.5% in 2026, given the war with Iran.) The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were themselves responsible for the rampant Biden inflation. They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged waxen effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton. So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability”—or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries. Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democrat aristocracy—the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens. The grandees of the party also normalized the crazy mobs of BLM and Antifa long ago. Democrats as Dr. Frankenstein Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID-19 virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke Lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor (thanks to her grandfather’s high cheekbones); the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding. Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over ten million—illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state? Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”? All this was about as radical as it gets. The Democrat establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators. “By any means necessary” was a Democrat mantra over a decade ago. By 2016, the Democrat leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election. In 2020, the Democrat deep state—Antony Blinken, Mike Morell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, and others—had fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election. The Democrat establishment, working with its appendages in Silicon Valley, had censored news attesting to the authenticity of Hunter’s embarrassing laptop contents. (For an account of what the establishment was doing in 2020, read Molly Ball’s Time essay describing the “conspiracies” and “cabals” that worked behind the scenes to change voting rules and ensure a Biden victory through mail-in, no-ID balloting.) Then came four unhinged years of lawfare: special counsel Jack Smith’s seizure of the communications of senators and congressmen, the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home, the effort to de-ballot Trump, and the five civil and criminal circuses that resulted in half a billion dollars in fines. All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by a host of mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos, and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a traitor, or a Putin asset. Meanwhile, a host of loudmouth actors, Democrat activists, and celebrities competed with each other about how best to kill him—whether by shooting, stabbing, poisoning, beheading, burning him alive, or blowing him up. Trump supporters were libeled over the years by establishment Democrats as irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage. Even an establishment figure like Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-appointed Pentagon lawyer, called for a military coup in Foreign Policy just 10 days after Trump first took office in 2017. Three would-be assassins got close enough to killing Trump to draw return fire from the Secret Service—near-death encounters that elicited both unapologetic applause for the attempts and lamentations that the shooters had failed from the now truly deranged social-media Left. Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione and the glee that followed in many Democrat social media circles after the murder of Charlie Kirk. Yet did the establishment Democrat apparat calm these waters? Or did it set them boiling? It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices, screaming in front of a mob outside the court’s doors, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Schumer sounded more like a pink-haired anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement street protester than a U.S. senator. No surprise, then, that two years later a left-wing would-be assassin turned up at Kavanaugh’s home, along with crowds of enthusiastic protestors. Does anyone recall Maxine Waters urging the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public? “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” Does anyone also remember Nancy Pelosi, then-Democrat House Minority leader, greenlighting “uprisings” over ICE deportations? “I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.” So spoke the radical owner of two mansions, who entered Congress with little net worth and will leave it worth over $100 million. A Tip O’Neill she wasn’t. Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the George Floyd demonstrations, which, weeks earlier, had already turned violent and indeed deadly (despite what the “fact-checkers” asserted): “This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.” After four months of rioting in 2020—which left 25 people dead and 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, inflicted $2 billion in damage, and saw a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church set ablaze—who gave the perpetrators a pass, with 14,000 arrests followed by few convictions and fewer jailings? What happened during the violence against ICE in 2025-26? Did the Democrat apparat at least pretend to deplore the violence, or did it instead egg it on? And who, as sore losers in 2016 and 2024, normalized the idea of dismantling the constitutional order—first by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and later by planning to pack the court, end the filibuster, and admit two new left-wing states? The Frankenstein Monster Awakens So the socialists and communists did not really hijack the party. Rather, these youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats. They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence—and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders. The upper-middle-class Mamdanis, Pikers, and AOCs did not storm the party parapets but were invited in by a party that had already radicalized itself—amid its hatred of Trump, its growing estrangement from the majority of the American people, and its fury at becoming increasingly powerless without the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court. Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether. Given all that, the Democratic Socialists of America scarcely had to be invented. After a decade of establishment Democrats destroying norms and traditions, deliberately dividing us by race, seeking to eliminate life-giving fossil fuels, and trying to implement dangerous crackpot ideas like critical race theory, critical legal theory, no cash bail, and defunding the police, the only change is that the now-electrified socialist monsters have awakened. They have mocked their stagnant creators, reenergized the old messages, and simply sought to replace the messengers. Gone or going soon were the old white people like Pelosi and Schumer—despite their pathetic efforts to appease the Jacobins. In their place arose a cohort of upper-middle-class, degreed but otherwise poorly educated white urbanites, furious that their empty university certificates, student debt, inflated sense of self, and precious titles and jobs—but low salaries—had not delivered the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, and other professionals in their urban circles who had real jobs. The downwardly mobile whites who formed 85% of the official ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were joined by first- and second-generation immigrants, many from failed socialist states. These were ingrates who, once safe and prospering in America, learned that boutique radicalism and identity chauvinism won cultural acceptance and conferred DEI leverage in their blue-state urban circles—and so sought to dismantle the very host nation that had saved them. For both groups, anger was fed by envy of others with more stuff and by furor at a Middle America that plowed ahead, ignoring both their supposed talents and their hyped plight. And the Democratic Party provided the radical model—which, in their youthful ignorance, the new socialists pledged to enhance and exceed. No longer, they thought, would hardcore leftists have to hide their agendas for fear of losing elections. In their folly, they attributed Harris’s 2024 implosion not to her clumsy efforts to disown and disguise her radical past (including the most left-wing voting record in the Senate), but to her not being left-wing enough. In other words, a milquetoast socialist had lost in 2024 not because she was too radical for America, but because she was not socialist—or indeed, communist—enough. The crazed new socialists bragged that they could win by loudly and brazenly broadcasting the old agendas: open borders, mass amnesties, defunding the police, ending fossil fuels, attacking—and now seeking to destroy—the Senate and Supreme Court, and scapegoating whites and white “privilege.” To this old mainstream Democrat farrago, they added one new element: openly embracing anti-Zionism and indeed antisemitism. America will soon see how this insanity works out. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump’s administration is planning to spend almost $200 million on programs aimed at countering China’s growing influence in Central America. According to a congressional notification obtained by The Associated Press, the State Department could oversee $175.8 million in an effort to replace aging undersea telecommunications cables in the Caribbean and Central America. The project is intended to prevent China from expanding its influence in the region through telecommunications infrastructure, benefiting projects in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Haiti. According to the congressional notification, the program would fund “the installation of strategically selected undersea cable infrastructure” and help foreign governments partner with private-sector cable installers. Policymakers and experts alike believe the administration’s efforts are crucial to America’s national security. A State Department official, who spoke anonymously, told PBS that China’s economic activities in the Western Hemisphere pose risks to U.S. national security and economic prosperity. When asked if this is an adequate move from the administration, Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., told the Daily Signal that despite countries like Venezuela and Colombia reestablishing relations with the United States under the Trump administration, “it is clear that the Chinese are abandoning things,” and “we have to make it clear that the Western Hemisphere belongs to America.” Last week, Fine took part in the first congressional delegation to visit Venezuela in over a decade. Steve Yates, a former White House national security adviser and current national security policy expert at The Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Signal that “this kind of Chinese influence from the Western Hemisphere is essential because undersea cables carry the vast majority of data traffic,” and because China’s control “creates persistent intelligence, surveillance, and disruption risks on America’s southern approaches.” “Chinese influence is already significant in ports, telecommunications equipment, space tracking facilities, and select digital projects across the region,” Yates continued. “This cable initiative is a timely step to prevent further entrenchment before the costs of remediation rise.” This is a practical way to implement the 2025 National Security Strategy’s mandate to deny non-hemispheric competitors the ability to own or control strategically vital assets in the hemisphere, he added. The project aligns with the Federal Communications Commission’s June 2026 rules that tighten security standards, restrict Chinese equipment, and accelerate the deployment of trusted submarine cables. Yates added that this effort to reduce Chinese leverage around the Panama Canal supports the disruption of the China-origin fentanyl networks that rely on vulnerable regional infrastructure. A Broader Strategy This effort comes as part of a broader strategy to curb China’s influence across vulnerable corners of the globe. According to another internal department document obtained by The Associated Press, the State Department is considering spending nearly $500 million more on initiatives designed to counter China throughout the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and Asia. “The United States must respond to the [Chinese Communist Party’s] growing economic, technological, and diplomatic leverage around the world, which undermines our national interests,” the document states. In a statement to PBS News, a senior U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the administration plans to increase funding to counter China but declined to discuss specific projects. The official added that many proposals remain under discussion.

One of Aesop’s best-known and most-beloved fables is the story of “The Dog and the Shadow,” which goes like this: “It happened that a Dog had got a piece of meat and was carrying it home in his mouth to eat it in peace. Now on his way home he had to cross a plank lying across a running brook. As he crossed, he looked down and saw his own shadow reflected in the water beneath. Thinking it was another dog with another piece of meat, he made up his mind to have that also. So he made a snap at the shadow in the water, but as he opened his mouth the piece of meat fell out, dropped into the water and was never seen more. “Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.” I’ve been thinking a great deal about the fable this week, after reading that Julie Masino, the CEO of Cracker Barrel, has decided to step down from her position. According to an announcement made by the company, Masino will leave her executive role on Aug. 10 and will stay on with the company as an adviser until Oct. 9.     Masino, you may recall, was the CEO who, last year, introduced the new, stripped-down Cracker Barrel logo as part of a much larger, $700 million “transformation plan.” I’m not entirely sure why it cost almost three-quarters of a billion dollars to remove the beloved “Old Timer” from the logo, but then, they didn’t ask me. Maybe they should have. If they’d asked me, I might have told them that they were making a huge mistake. I might have warned them that their customer base would revolt. I might have told them that the backlash on social media and their consumers’ response would be overwhelming. I might have suggested that they ensure the rest of their house was in order and be certain that they were doing everything they could to make the company successful, both for its customers and its shareholders, before they started messing around with their decades-old, most identifiable, beloved public image. I might have told them to slow down, that they were—wittingly or unwittingly—walking into a political minefield. But again, they didn’t ask me. And as it turns out, they didn’t ask those customers and shareholders either. To be fair, the logo, in and of itself, wasn’t that big a deal. But, as I noted here last year just after the logo story exploded: “There’s a reason I put those four words—’in and of itself’—in italics. In and of itself, the logo does not matter. In a vacuum, it’s irrelevant. But we don’t exist in a vacuum, and major corporate rebranding efforts signified by logo redesign rarely, if ever, occur ‘in and of themselves.’ In most cases, such rebranding efforts are indicative of a change in thinking among corporate executives.” This was true at Bud Light, of course. And Target. And Harley-Davidson. And countless other companies whose executives thought they could get involved in political or cultural issues, largely in opposition to the desires and beliefs of their customers, only to find that those customers reacted poorly to their changes—and that their shareholders reacted poorly to their customers’ unhappiness. It was true at Cracker Barrel as well. As Robby Starbuck—my colleague at The Heritage Foundation’s Free Enterprise Initiative—demonstrated, Cracker Barrel’s executives and directors had long been pushing the company into political spaces and into associations with left-wing political organizations, including the aggressively pro-trans pressure group, the Human Rights Campaign. Against this background, the logo change and the transformation plan in general were perceived as an attempt to make the company appear less redneck-y, less associated with “backward” rural America. Unsurprisingly, Cracker Barrel’s customers reacted poorly, and then, in turn, so did the shareholders. Activist investor Sardar Biglari (Biglari Capital, ~3% stake) launched a proxy fight in September 2025, calling management “worse than mediocre” and accusing it of betraying “the Company’s heritage” and undermining “investor confidence.” Surprisingly, both major proxy advisory firms—Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis—broke with management and took Biglari’s side, recommending that shareholders vote to remove board member Gilbert Dávila (the chairman of the compensation committee and a marketing/diversity specialist who’d been on the board since 2020), explicitly citing his role in shaping the disastrous rebrand strategy. Interestingly, ISS said that Masino’s responsibility was “no less than Dávila’s” but recommended keeping her, for fear that her removal would be destabilizing. The shareholder vote on Nov. 20, 2025, produced something of a mixed bag of results. Dávila did, indeed, lose his board seat, but Masino survived. More troublingly, in a move seemingly intended to enhance director and executive entrenchment rather than advance accountability, the board simultaneously adopted new bylaws designed to limit Biglari’s ability to launch future proxy fights. Biglari and the rest of the company’s shareholders were understandably upset. Cracker Barrel’s market value fell from $2.0 billion (Aug. 7, 2023, when Masino was appointed CEO-elect) to $667.8 million (Nov. 12, 2025), a decline of roughly 67%. Biglari’s proxy filing called this “massive shareholder value destruction,” perhaps understating the case. Cracker Barrel shares were down nearly 50% year-to-date as of March 2026, putting the company on pace for its worst annual performance since 1999. Its fiscal Q4 2025 results were brutal: Revenue was down 3%, and net income was down 63%. In the grand scheme of things, it’s unlikely that the logo change—in and of itself—was the cause of this shareholder destruction. But it was a big part of it. The company’s executive team and directors weren’t happy with what they had. They saw something murky and mysterious that caught their collective eye and fooled them into wanting more. Not content to be mere fiduciary agents for their shareholders’ interests, they wanted to be advocates or allies or enlightened thinkers or … whatever. They dropped what they had in pursuit of something better, something ill-defined and ethereal but still enticing. Shareholders paid the price for their foolishness. Finally, Julie Masino is paying it as well.

Every child is looking for someone to become. The only question is where he will find that person.  For generations, American schools helped with that quest by introducing students to heroes—men and women whose courage, perseverance, and devotion to principle shaped the nation.  George Washington’s voluntary resignation of his military commission after the Revolutionary War was more than a historical milestone. It was a lesson in restraint and republican virtue. And Abraham Lincoln’s determination to preserve the Union illustrated leadership under almost unimaginable pressure.  They were not perfect—no human being is—but they were worthy of admiration.  But that distinction is increasingly being lost.  Too often, history classes have become exercises in deconstruction rather than inspiration. Instead of asking what made an extraordinary person admirable, students are taught to search for the flaw that supposedly invalidates everything else.  The result is not historical sophistication but cynicism.  In 2021, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to rename 44 schools, including ones bearing the names of Washington and Lincoln. The committee responsible for the recommendations did not consult historians, and some of its judgments were based on factual errors. One committee member reportedly dismissed the need for expert input by asking what the point would be of bringing in historians.  Although the decision was later reversed, the impulse behind it has become all too common. A historical figure who failed to satisfy every shifting moral standard of the present is too often treated as someone whom children should no longer be encouraged to honor.  Of course, historical honesty matters. Washington made serious mistakes as a military commander, such as those at the Battles of Long Island and Fort Washington in 1776, which cost soldiers their lives and freedom. Lincoln made decisions, such as suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, that remain open to criticism. Great men and women of history were capable of error, inconsistency, and failure.  But there is a profound difference between acknowledging imperfections and reducing an entire life to them.  Imagine teaching children about Babe Ruth while discussing only the times he struck out.  No one would consider that a complete account of his career. It would produce a distorted picture of one of baseball’s greatest players.  The same is true of any historical figure.  The purpose of studying heroes is not to canonize them. It is to show young people that flawed human beings can nevertheless display extraordinary courage, integrity, and self-sacrifice.  And children need those examples.  A 2022 study published in the medical journal Cureus found that having role models, mentors, and heroes as an adolescent was linked to academic performance, confidence, and behavior.  In other words, admiration is not trivial. It helps shape ambition and behavior.  Children imitate what they esteem.  And when schools fail to provide them with heroes, someone else will fill the vacuum.  American children today spend countless hours consuming content on YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms. In the absence of worthy historical role models, it is hardly surprising that many increasingly look to internet personalities for cues about how to think, behave, and live.  There is of course nothing inherently wrong with admiring an athlete, entertainer, or internet personality. Some are admirable people.  But fame is not the same as greatness.  Nor should we confuse visibility with virtue. The ability to attract attention does not qualify someone to guide the moral imagination of a child.  That is why schools should teach the lives of Washington, Lincoln, and countless others—not as spotless legends but as the stories of complete human beings, placing their faults in context without allowing those faults to erase their virtues.  That is not an argument for hiding uncomfortable truths. It is an argument for perspective.  A mature understanding of history recognizes that a person can be wrong in one area and admirable in another. It can acknowledge injustice without denying achievement and identify moral failure without pretending that nothing noble remains.  Indeed, the imperfections of historical heroes can make their virtues more accessible.  Children do not need mythical figures who never struggled, doubted, or failed. They need examples of people who faced weakness, adversity, and temptation yet still chose duty over convenience and courage over comfort.  Theodore Roosevelt observed, “Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”  Heroes show children what such work looks like.  They teach that courage is a choice, that integrity often carries a cost, and that one person can alter the course of history.  Children cannot aspire to virtues they are never shown. And if we stop introducing them to people worth admiring, we should not be surprised when they struggle to find anyone worth becoming. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

CNN’s Brian Stelter sent out his “Reliable Sources” email on July 28 with the chirpy headline “Surprise: PBS and NPR are still alive and kicking.” Why on Earth would that be a surprise? Depriving these liberal networks of taxpayer money wasn’t a death sentence. In last year’s debate over defunding, PBS and NPR executives routinely claimed federal funding was a tiny fraction of their budget—and that cutting them off would have a horrible result. How does that make sense? Then again, PBS and NPR executives also claimed they weren’t biased, which was preposterous. NPR’s “Public Editor” Kelly McBride explained: “The entire public media network, including every member station across the country as well as PBS and NPR, runs on about $3.2 billion a year. The federal grants represented about 16 percent of that total.” That’s not a tiny fraction. One year after President Donald Trump signed the bill to defund them, Stelter happily reported: “Station executives credit a burst of philanthropy caused by the GOP’s funding cut.” He then touted a “terrific story” on the state of so-called public broadcasting by NPR media reporter David Folkenflik. A surge in donations, he admitted, “would appear to confirm the position of some conservative critics who say people who value public media can pay for it themselves.” What these reporters have failed to explain is that the surge in what NPR calls “rage-giving” came from the left. Folkenflik used the word “conservative” five times to describe their opponents, but never used any words like “liberal” or “left” to describe the ardent supporters now surging their money into the system. No conservatives were allowed to make any criticisms of NPR. It was all fluff. In April, he reported Connie Ballmer—wife of Steve Ballmer, one of the Microsoft founders—contributed $80 million to NPR, and another anonymous donor added $33 million. They like NPR exactly as it is, and NPR and PBS never moved a whisker closer to the center as the Republicans held hearings and prepared to defund them. This entire aftermath could have been predicted. The result is exactly what conservatives argued, that it was unjust to take our money to put on relentlessly biased programs and that liberals should be the ones to pay for their liberal-pleasing propaganda. PBS and NPR also please the Left by the stories they smother. The “public” networks haven’t reported on their airwaves about the Anthony Fauci diary entries released by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. They were completely supportive of all of the Fauci-ordered lockdowns on schools, businesses, churches and even family holiday gatherings. In 2020, NPR also notoriously proclaimed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a “pure distraction,” not a news story. In the years afterward, as other liberal media outlets admitted the laptop was authentic and newsworthy, NPR adamantly refused to bend. On July 18, NPR aired a softball interview by weekend anchor Scott Simon under this empathetic headline: “Hunter Biden shares his painful road to recovery and fight against political scrutiny.” “Public” broadcasting is a powerful communications tool for the Left, with hundreds of affiliates in large cities and rural communities, pumping out narratives nationwide about how everything Trump and his conservative supporters are pushing is toxic, even “un-American.” These networks hope the funding cutoff is temporary. Whenever Democrats get back in control, they will reopen the spigot, signaling what we all know: “public broadcasting” is Democrat Radio and Democrat TV. COPYRIGHT CREATORS.COM 2026 We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.