Before Gen. George Washington crossed the Delaware, a band of hardened fishermen rewrote the rules of the American military—and history nearly forgot them.  But Wedgwood Circle, a collective of investors, patrons, and creative talent in the entertainment industry, did not.  With the help of a $50,000 Heritage Foundation America’s 250th Innovation Prize grant, Wedgwood Circle is producing “Marblehead: The Untold Story of the Men in the Boat,” a 120-page graphic novel that brings to life the story of the Marblehead regiment—the first racially integrated unit in the American military during the American Revolution. They were involved in several critical conflicts during the Revolutionary War, including Washington’s iconic crossing of the Delaware River.   The regiment was responsible for many heroic acts throughout their time in the war, including when they provided Washington’s initial bodyguard when conspiracies to assassinate him arose in the early years of the war.  The project was developed in partnership with MORE Productions and a team of experienced graphic novelists, educational consultants, publication experts, and promotional strategists to ensure broad distribution and impact.   Mandi Hart, filmmaker and attorney who collaborated on the project through MORE Productions, told the Daily Signal in an interview at the time of the award:  The Marbleheaders epitomized E Pluribus Unum—out of many, one. Their brotherhood was forged by necessity on the dangerous Grand Banks and solidified in combat during the grueling years of the Revolutionary War. We hope their example inspires current and future generations of Americans to pursue the same spirit of connection across distinctions. Told through rich visuals and narrative, the graphic novel aims to make this historically significant yet little-known story accessible to a wide audience of readers and to inspire interest in America’s revolutionary heritage.  The Marblehead regiment is an inspirational tale that deserves to be told. Their courage and brotherhood show a necessary unity that, although uncommon, is desperately needed in America.  “Creating content can be a lonely and risky exercise,” Hart said. “The opportunity to be with other recipients (upon receiving the award) allowed us to encourage one another, create a community of cause, and possibly collaborate in the future. Up to now, the Marblehead story has been largely unknown, but we look forward to sharing this amazing true story with the nation in December 2026,” which coincides with the 250th anniversary of Washington’s crossing of the Delaware.  The project plans to have a special release, which will distribute “Marblehead” to schools, libraries, and homeschool families.  “We will develop educational resources and activity materials that coincide with the graphic novel to increase its impact and audience engagement,” Hart continued. “We also hope to exhibit in person at a handful of librarian events, comic cons, and homeschool conferences.”  All of which predicts an exciting future for the story of the Marbleheaders.  Wedgwood Circle’s award-winning work joins other America’s 250th Innovation Prize recipients whose projects use education, storytelling, competition, and media to promote civic engagement, constitutional understanding, and patriotism as part of the nation’s semiquincentennial celebration. Additional Round Two winners are: Harlan Institute Mountain States Policy Center The Moving Picture Institute.  Constituting America Round One winners of the America’s 250th Innovation Prize: Creative Studio to Release Video Series for America’s 250th Anniversary  Faith Group Wins Innovation Prize for America’s 250th Celebration ‘A First of Its Kind’: Bestselling Author Crafts American Fable Collection Catholic Nonprofit Develops Resources to Inspire Patriotism Virginia Nonprofit Wins Prize to Create US History Documentaries for Nation’s 250th Anniversary

Viewers of “Fox & Friends” have watched the show’s co-host, Steve Doocy, travel across the country in recent months ahead of America’s 250th anniversary celebration. Today, Doocy joined his co-hosts at Liberty State Park in New Jersey to wrap up the “For All America” road trip with a live giveaway of a Camping World RV. “The best part about crisscrossing the country for our RV trip is the excitement for this national moment,” Doocy wrote for the New York Post this week. “There’s so much news right now—a lot of it good, a lot of it bad. But running up to the 4th of July, I hear a lot of people talk about America for a change.” Six couples joined Doocy and his “Fox & Friends” co-hosts for Wednesday’s grand-prize presentation. While one lucky couple went home with the RV, the other five finalists were surprised with free travel trailers of their own. An All-American Road Trip Over the past two months, Doocy crisscrossed the country collecting entries from viewers at stops in Jekyll Island, Georgia; Destin, Florida; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; the Jersey Shore; Houston; and the Kansas City area. Six finalists—one from each stop—were flown to New York for a live showdown Wednesday to see who would drive off with the RV. Alongside Doocy, co-hosts Ainsley Earhardt, Brian Kilmeade, and Lawrence Jones ran the contestants through the elimination round, handing each finalist a key and having them try to start the RV one at a time. After four of the couples failed to start the RV, Doocy turned to the final two in anticipation of who might win. When it was time for Linda Cutruzzula and her husband, the engine started and the show’s hosts erupted in cheers. ‘The Most Incredible Country’ “This whole adventure has been amazing,” she told the hosts. “I just want you to know that we live in the most incredible country that there ever has been or ever will be.” Camping World CEO Matthew Wagner joined the broadcast to hand over the keys and described the prize as a Class A motor home, with a retail price north of $90,000. Fox News and Camping World covered the taxes on the prize. Wagner told the finalists who didn’t win that they wouldn’t be going home empty-handed. Camping World had a second RV—a travel trailer—waiting on set, and every one of the five runner-up families was awarded one on the spot. “Everybody wins a camper,” Doocy told the crowd.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The current conservative Supreme Court rarely gets it wrong when it comes to election administration. But in this week’s ruling in Watson v. RNC, that reliable majority flipped on its head with Justices John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett siding with the liberals by holding that, despite plain language in federal law dictating one clear federal election day, states are free to hold federal elections that go days, weeks, or even months into an overtime period for absentee and mail ballot collection. Now, it’s up to the 14 states that allow for post-Election Day ballot receipt to inject confidence in Election Day by reaffirming—as required by federal law—that Election Day does not somehow mean “Election Week” or even “Election Month.” In a 5-4 decision that saw Barrett siding with the likes of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the court upheld a Mississippi law that allowed for ballots that were only postmarked by Election Day, but received by election officials days later, to be counted in the regularly tabulated totals for an election. In arriving at this conclusion, the court followed contorted logic that an election could be deemed to be concluded despite states being permitted to actively collect—and solicit the receipt of—new absentee ballots. And it summarily discounted the fact that, since first-class mail may be recalled, a voter’s choice is not final until that ballot gets delivered to the election official, meaning that for voters who vote by mail, that choice isn’t finalized until the mail is actually delivered. O.J. Simpson famously published a book called “If I Did It,” in which he explained that while he didn’t kill his wife, he laid out the way in which he would have done it. In his dissent, Justice Alito didn’t need to refer to such hypotheticals to show how someone could undermine—even steal—an election, he instead cited five very real, very recent instances in which absentee ballot fraud resulted in a new election, including one in which “Georgia courts had voided an election after finding ‘widespread’ absentee-ballot fraud involving vote buying, vote selling, multiple voting, felon voting, and deceased-person voting.” Many states also permit harvested absentee ballots or even ballots without a postmark altogether to be delivered after Election Day. However, the Supreme Court’s majority opinion simply ignored the policy arguments that a mandated stop time for ballot receipt would prevent fraud and restore confidence in the elections. Instead, they said that those arguments are better directed at state legislatures. On that point, we agree: States could and should take any number of actions that would bolster confidence in the election process, including implementing photo voter ID, implementing proof of citizenship requirements on voter registration, commonsense safeguards in the casting and counting of ballots, as well as transparency in the procedures by which federal agencies and regular citizens can meaningfully audit those processes. Now, the 14 states that still allow ballots to be received after Election Day could start by doing what the Supreme Court would not – mandating that the prescribed day on which the election is held means the ballot receipt deadline. Late last year, the State of Ohio saw an opportunity to instill even more confidence in its elections by passing and signing a bill that would take bold action even before this Supreme Court holding and end the state’s four-day period after an election during which absentee ballots could still be received and counted towards the election tallies. Other states should follow Ohio’s lead and give their voters the right to know that ballots being tallied in the days and even weeks following Election Day are not the result of some ballot drop or ballot harvesting operation in a way that nullifies the legitimate, validly-cast votes on or before Election Day. Election Day means Election Day for a reason, even if the majority of SCOTUS disagrees. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.   Recently, we’ve had a lot of discussion about racial relations, and the consensus from left to right seems constant and uniform that they’re getting much worse.  There were two or three iconic events this last week that emphasized that pessimism. One was the Juneteenth celebration in Chicago, which commemorated the official end of slavery in the 1860s and is now our newest national holiday.  It ended up with 39 people wounded, seven dead, semiautomatic gunfire. It was almost like a war zone. The mayor of Chicago, Mayor [Brandon] Johnson, did not comment on what was the cause of this or the pathologies that would lead people to slaughter. This was entirely 100% Black-on-Black crime, but he was talking about illiberality and discrimination against trans people when his city is under siege.  At the same time, or prior to that, was the Karmelo Anthony murder, where Karmelo Anthony, a young Black teenager at a track meet, ventured over to the opposing side by intent, carrying a knife in his backpack, went into a tent where the entire group there was from the opposite team that he was playing, and then said he would not leave when asked 10, 12 times, and finally said, “Somebody,” he said, “push me out or try it and you’ll find out.”  And a young man by the name of [Austin] Metcalf slightly touched him, and he stabbed him in the heart, killed him, ran away, and the result was the Black community has championed Karmelo Anthony. Not all of the Black community, but a sizable portion, and it’s gotten to the point where they believe that he was justified because the so-called white community doesn’t understand Black pride, and you don’t interfere with the space, et cetera.  In other words, ignoring all the details that he deliberately ventured over to cause a confrontation which could have been settled peacefully if he just left. But the reaction was what was disturbing.  And then in addition to that, there was the Caitlin Clark incident. She is, remember, the superstar of the Women’s National Basketball Association, and she came out of a fantastic college career.  She’s very tall, kind of thin, not frail, but not muscular, but she’s a wonderful outside shooter. And somebody with that height and the ability, who’s quick, and the ability to pass has revolutionized the Women’s Basketball Association. And the result is she is gaining, not just for herself and her team, but for the entire league, enormous increases in revenue.  Some people believe that she’s responsible for 25% in increased revenues. So all the players are getting raises. They have increased stature. They have bigger audiences. They have bigger ad opportunities. They fly not passenger class commercial anymore. It’s been a win-win.  And yet systematically Black players, women have been trying to hurt her.  And the most recent incident was that we had a Black player from the opposite team knock her down, and then when she tried to get up, another player may have tried to stop her, but one player took her fist and hit her in the neck or pressed her in the neck, and there were also a knee involved, and it was pretty clear that there was a deliberate attempt.  And this is one of, according to a lot of news accounts, 10 or 12 incidents where there has been flagrant fouls issued because the players are trying to hurt her.  So what was the commentary? The commentary was, well, the teams in the WNBA are mostly Black. They’re mostly, to be candid, lesbian, and Caitlin Clark is white and straight, and therefore, this supposedly racist audience has flocked to the WNBA to cheer her on in a divisive standard.  There’s no evidence that that is true, but the reaction from the Black women and the majority of them, probably not so, but from a sizable minority of them, is to hurt her and damage her even though they know that that is not in their interest.  I’m gonna talk about that a little bit later, but when you add up all of these incidents, you get the impression that something has gone wrong.  And usually, the standard exegesis is given the traditions of slavery that have been gone for 160-plus years, Jim Crow in the South, and then this new term systematic racism, white privilege, etc., etc., then there’s a justified rage.  But that rage and what I just outlined were way in the distant past.  We’re talking about the present and how the Black community can flourish like every other community, given it has shocking crime statistics, shocking divorce statistics, shocking illegitimacy, single-family parenthood, etc.  And how did we get here? How did we get to this mess?  I think we were making pretty good progress in the ’80s and ’90s with a whole new generation of Black politicians, Black athletes, Black actors, Black everybody.  And there was a growing sense that race was incidental, not essential to who we are. It was essential in a multiracial society. After all, we don’t want to end up like India or Indonesia or Brazil, where we’re racially obsessed, or we have caste, or we have classes. It doesn’t work in a democratic society.  But Barack Obama came in and said he was going to heal all of us in 2009. He did just the opposite.  Almost immediately with the Louis Henry Gates incident, the beer summit, he emphasized race. He said things that were not true, that the police systematically are more likely to shoot young Black men who are unarmed versus white men, given the incidence of who is arrested.  Statistics do not bear that out.  Pretty soon, affirmative action, which was a black/white solution of some 60 years to past discrimination, morphed into diversity, equity, inclusion.  And under Obama, he had this vision that anybody who was not white… Of course, he was half white, but he never identified as white.  He always identified sort of like the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy. If you had one drop of non-white blood, then you were non-white.  But he identified as non-white, but he said that 30% of the country, that was the basis of DEI, these would be immigrants from India, immigrants from Mexico, people from China, Japan, had a sort of updated Jesse Jackson Rainbow Coalition, and they had legitimate grievances for past sins against the 70 or 65% white population.  So in all of these cases, the universities and the political system and the bureaucracies institutionalized that anger and that binary.  It comes out of Marxist ideology that there is no middle, no middle class. There are oppressed, oppressors, victimized, victimizers.  But this was new because they substituted race for class.  This is not sustainable because we are now in the seventh decade of the civil rights movement.  We’ve had about $25 trillion invested in Great Society programs. We’ve had set-asides. We’ve had affirmative action. We’ve had theme houses, separate graduations, separate dorms, separate safe spaces.  We’ve had a whole litany, and what’s happening now is there is an identifiable weariness, fatigue with all of this.  It’s not just from so-called white people. It’s  not from racists. It’s from the Black middle class, and you can see the Black middle class is getting very angry because they are more prone to encounter Black youth, and they are the victims disproportionately of Black crime compared to other minority groups.  And there’s conservatives in the Black community who are now looking at what Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury have warned us for years, and that is during the worst moments of segregation, the Black community had created paradigms of success, nuclear families, fathers present in the household, strict discipline for the children, like all other communities.  And that was sort of wiped out or at least crippled during the Great Society where the government replaced the parents.  So where are we now?  If Black politicians of the left continue to not look at what’s causing these shootouts or this racism from Black people, then they’re only gonna further alienate the majority of Black people who want truth and they want change within the Black community. But more importantly, they’re gonna alienate 70% of the population who does not agree with them.  Hispanics, Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, white Americans do not believe that society forces Black people to shoot each other or to commit crimes at higher rates than other communities.  That solution has to come from the Black community, and it’s not any longer a result of historic transgressions or injustice more than a century and a half ago.  That’s not the answer. The answer is here and now, and it’s a self-help, self-discipline within the Black community, and calls for such reform are coming from the Black community.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

History is written by the victors, and more than 30 years after his death, Richard Nixon is finally being vindicated. During an interview earlier this month at the Nixon Presidential Library, Vice President JD Vance observed that “Nixon’s historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a cultural renaissance, and deservedly so.” Vance has clearly noticed the growing online phenomenon of young conservatives taking ownership of Richard Nixon and transforming him into a social media star. The trend was ignited over the past year by the Richard Nixon Foundation’s social media accounts, which began posting archival photos and videos of the former president that are specifically tailored to reach Gen Z. Clips of Nixon’s speeches and even of Nixon walking to Notorious B.I.G. songs are proving to be stylish and engaging content. The Foundation’s Instagram page now has almost 110,000 followers. Social media influencers began posting videos of themselves unboxing Nixon-themed merchandise, a tote bag with the phrase “Pretty Girls for Nixon” went viral, and people online began arguing whether Nixon was the greatest president of all time. Gen Z adopted the phrase “Nixonmaxxing” as a descriptor of their newfound affection for the 37th president. The youth embrace of Nixon is surprising, given how he has been portrayed in the media and in school curricula for the past few decades. In AP U.S. history study guides, for instance, Nixon is often depicted negatively, primarily focusing on the Watergate scandal and accusing him of eroding the public’s trust in the government. Renowned historian Nigel Hamilton compared Nixon to Hitler: “Like that of the leader of the Third Reich, Richard Nixon’s downfall was one of prolonged agony as his enemies closed in upon him after the Watergate break-in of June 1972.” Fellow historian Randall J. Stephens has similarly characterized Nixon as a “power-hungry authoritarian.” Movies like Nixon (1995) and Watchmen (2009) have also done their fair share to tarnish his name, portraying him as paranoid, power-hungry, and deeply corrupt. Even “Futurama” humorously depicts Nixon’s floating head fighting for political control in the year 3000. Pop culture painted Nixon as a supervillain, and many young people never questioned that narrative. In 2023, Nathan Pinkoski’s article “How the Deep State Took Down Nixon” helped shift the conversation about Nixon. Pinkoski argues that Nixon was the target of a sinister scheme by deep-state operatives to undermine his presidency and destroy his administration. He makes a compelling case that the Watergate scandal was an act of sabotage, and that the nefarious image of Nixon we often see is something of a myth. Through his analysis of formerly classified documents, Pinkoski concludes that the Watergate scandal was part of an “institutional ‘conflict’” and “that Nixon was removed from office not because he endangered the constitutional order, but because his bureaucratic and political enemies plotted successfully against him.” Pinkoski also highlights the challenges Nixon overcame to win the presidency in a landslide victory, championing his efficacy as a statesman and political operative. Pinkoski’s analysis of Nixon set off waves of online discussion, as people began to realize that perhaps Nixon had been unfairly maligned. However, it should come as no surprise that his resurgence as a beloved public figure came shortly after the 2024 election. As Vance put it, “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same group of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump.” Vance has a point. The public’s perception of President Donald Trump has been negatively influenced by the misdeeds of his political enemies. The Russiagate hoax, impeachment attempts, and lawfare Trump has faced indicate that he is fighting against a powerful and enraged bureaucracy. Trump’s popularity with young people might help explain why some young people have fully embraced “Nixonmaxxing.” In 2024, Trump earned a larger share of the youth vote than he had in both of his previous elections, indicating that he had growing favorability. One YouGov poll showed that shortly after his election, Trump had a whopping 57% favorability rating among voters aged 18-29. 56% of young men voted for Trump. Trump spoke openly about how he was lied about and targeted by mainstream media outlets, a populist message that resonated with young people who felt like they were being ignored by elitist Democrats. Both Trump and Nixon are appealing because they feel countercultural. As conservatives face the threats of oppressive leftwing media conglomerates, DEI, and socialism, they feel like rebels. Nixon was considered a threat to the state, and he was removed from office in faux disgrace. Trump was considered a threat to the state, and he was dragged into a Fulton County jail to be humiliated. Many young people are concerned that if they push back against liberal narratives, they will be silenced, threatened, and mocked. Nixon was taken down by the deep state, something many modern conservatives can personally sympathize with. Nixon’s life and legacy are resonating with the next generation of patriots who believe they need “Nixon, now more than ever.” We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.