Sen. Darline Graham’s (R-SC) odds of winning South Carolina’s special Republican primary skyrocketed from 14% to 80% in four days after President Donald Trump endorsed her, according to the prediction market Kalshi. CNN data analyst Harry Enten argued Tuesday that Trump’s endorsement has made Graham the overwhelming favorite in the August 11 special Republican primary to fill the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham. WATCH: Darline Graham’s now the favorite in SC. Why? Trump’s endorsement = most powerful I’ve ever seen. In senate primaries with no elected incumbent, his picks have won ~95% since 2022 & 100% in 2026. His own party approval is highest this century for a prez at this pt in term 2. pic.twitter.com/urpkkeI9vd — (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) July 21, 2026 “Darline Graham’s chances have rocketed up because rarely has the power of one man and his endorsements in primaries been as strong with Donald Trump,” Enten explained. He went on to cite the odds posted by Kalshi, which had Graham at 14% on July 17 and 80% just four days later — and he noted that the one major change in the interim was Trump’s endorsement, given before Graham had even declared her intent to seek a full term in office. “Now, that’s not 100%,” Enten conceded, adding, “But it’s way, way higher than 14%. She’s the clear favorite to fill that seat, or at least win the primary.” Enten noted that Graham was not an outlier, pointing to a number of recent primary races in which Trump had played kingmaker. “When it comes to Senate primaries, Donald Trump’s record is magnificent,” he told anchor John Berman. “Since 2022, it’s about 95% of the time. This year, in fewer races, it’s 100% of the time. No wonder why the prediction markets and the conventional wisdom have moved so rapidly once Trump made that endorsement!” Trump’s weight in recent primaries has been nearly insurmountable as candidate after candidate has soared to victory following a nod from the White House — and Graham now appears poised to follow suit in the August special primary for a seat Republicans are expected to retain in November.

Yet another champion of the common man is raking in millions off his political brand. Before President Trump’s first impeachment inquiry in 2019, nobody had ever heard of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman. His testimony made him a national celebrity and a hero of the self-described “Resistance,” a militantly anti-Trump collection of activists and personalities (that is, the group of people who have nothing better to do than cosplay as dissidents living in an authoritarian state). Since then, Vindman has retired from the army, entered a very lucrative consulting business, published two books, and become a highly paid speaker. The obscure lieutenant colonel became a sought-after personality overnight. He is now attempting to convert that brand into a Senate seat. His populist rhetoric is fairly boilerplate for the 2020s: “The people of Florida want a Senator who will use the power of the office to crush corruption and cut costs instead of using it to make millions for themselves and their billionaire backers.” Hardline populists love to ask about incentives. Who has an incentive to support whom? Which politician benefits from a particular crisis? Which bureaucrat gains authority from declaring another emergency? All good questions, but they always seem to exempt the very people asking them. Has it ever occurred to any of these rocket scientists that the fame and fortune of the Resistance movement may be an incentive to keep the Trump hysteria alive? Vindman now campaigns against career politicians and the “political elite class.” It has become especially fashionable to ask whether politicians perpetuate conflict to stay in power. And these people have some legitimate points. There are certainly instances of corruption and shady incentives in Washington. Old news. What gets a lot less attention is the plethora of commentators who derive their power from perpetuating media conflicts and apocalyptic narratives. According to Chuck Ross, an investigative reporter with the Washington Free Beacon, Vindman reported approximately $1.5 million in income from his consulting company, $240,000 from his personal Substack, $27,000 for a speech at a wealthy woman’s home, and quite a few other notable streams of income. Perhaps most notably, Vindman’s Substack features a “name the number” subscription option with a minimum contribution of $250 per year and no maximum. Individual Substack contributions do not have to be disclosed. In other words, Mr. Anti-Elite-Corruption has a personalized service through which you can send him large sums of money without having to reveal your identity to anyone except him. No risk of outside influence there. Of the $240,000 in Substack income, it remains unclear how much came from ordinary subscriptions and how much was funneled through this feature. Imagine a Republican politician collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars through a newsletter with this feature. We would be treated to an endless barrage of television monologues about “dark money,” the “billionaire class” (probably pertaining in some form or other to AIPAC) and the existential threat to our democracy. Let us then question who benefits from an inflammatory narrative. Vindman has profited handsomely off the war of public opinion that he helped create. And now, all of that fame has conveniently become a launchpad into those very same seats of power. Awfully convenient. This is hardly uncommon for an anti-elite champion, of course. Bernie Sanders made millions off of his books — all fiery critiques of capitalism. As in the case of Mr. Sanders, Vindman’s defenders will rush to argue, “But he earned that money! Aren’t you the proponents of earned wealth?” Yes, we are. The objection is not that Mr. Vindman earned a lot of money in commentary. It’s that he built a brand around criticizing people for profiting from political power, and then converted his own proximity to power into wealth and influence. Public discourse can always benefit from a healthy dose of skepticism. The political commentariat is not a disinterested or unbiased third party. Now that Mr. Vindman has ensconced himself in the lucrative world of influencers, his judgement on what constitutes a disaster deserves some scrutiny. If voters are really facing a crisis of credibility in politics, they ought to be wary of a man whose road to office is being paved with the gold of Resistance hysteria.

Former Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) says she is stepping away from electoral politics after two failed statewide campaigns, announcing that she is “done for now” with campaigning — and instead plans to focus on becoming a book influencer on social media. “I’m done for now with politics and campaigning,” Porter said in a video posted to Instagram last week. “Stay tuned for book recommendations, book ideas and author content.” The former California congresswoman has rebranded one of her Instagram accounts as “Katie Porter Turns the Page,” complete with the hashtag “#Bookstagram,” saying she plans to devote the page to book recommendations, author interviews, and literary discussions. Porter later told the Sacramento Bee that she is “closing the door” on running for office. “I am closing the door on being a candidate,” Porter said. “I cannot foresee that path back.” Porter first rose to national prominence after flipping a Republican-held Orange County congressional district in 2018. A former student and protégé of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), she became known on Capitol Hill for using a whiteboard during congressional hearings to grill executives from major banks, pharmaceutical companies, and other corporations. Rather than seek re-election to the House in 2024, Porter launched a bid for the Senate seat previously held by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She finished a distant third in California’s all-party primary behind eventual winner Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, failing to advance to the general election. She then entered California’s gubernatorial race but fared even worse, finishing fifth in this year’s primary with less than 5% of the vote after initially polling as one of the leading Democratic contenders. Porter’s gubernatorial campaign was dogged by questions surrounding her temperament after reports highlighted allegations of abusive treatment toward staff members. During the campaign, a video obtained by Politico showed Porter screaming at an aide during a virtual event while serving in Congress. “Get out of my f*cking shot!” Porter shouted after a staffer briefly appeared on camera before attempting to correct one of her statements. The incident followed earlier allegations that Porter had berated staff members, including reports that she blamed one employee for contracting COVID-19 in 2022, while she was still in the House. Porter later apologized for the outburst shown in the leaked video but argued that criticism of her demeanor reflected a double standard applied to female candidates. “I don’t know what I could have said or done other than be a man,” Porter told the Sacramento Bee. “We’ve also seen it is not hard to come up with female candidates for whom the term temperament has been used.” Despite stepping away from campaigning, Porter said she still plans to remain involved in public policy debates and civic education while focusing much of her public attention on books. “It’s partly a reference to a new chapter in my life, to change, but also to something I do a lot, which is turn the page when I’m reading,” Porter said of her new social media venture.

The “working class” isn’t voting for the Democratic Socialists of America. Underpaid, overeducated, and insufferably self-righteous leftists are. A new report from statistician Nate Silver found that the most reliably Democratic voting bloc in America holds a graduate degree and earns somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000 a year. Wouldn’t you know it: our favorite little communists, the card-carrying members of the DSA, are overwhelmingly college-educated (80% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher) yet distinctly unprosperous (45% report household incomes under $60,000). Oopsie. Turns out spending 785 years in school just to crawl out of the halls of the Intifada Ivies with a master’s in African Art won’t make you boatloads of money. It will, however, make you an aggrieved, uptight, miserable Marxist, whose life’s purpose isn’t reunion with the Lord our Savior, but a tireless personal crusade against procreation, on account of climate change. Okay, maybe that’s an overgeneralization. But the foundation holds. The average master’s student casting a ballot for socialism has sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into a degree they’re slowly realizing has no value in the real world, or isn’t needed at all, thanks to our country’s “elite overproduction” problem. They are perpetually, seethingly irate that the high school dropout who knows how to drill for oil has landed a far more valuable profession than they have. This data demolishes the lie these DSA activists are selling: that they represent the working class, the “little guy.” We heard it ad nauseam from oyster farmer and self-described bro Graham “I’d rape home invaders, but not in a gay way” Platner, running for Senate in Maine, and from Abdul El-Sayed, terror apologist running for Senate in Michigan. Unsurprisingly and despite their valiant efforts, the nepo baby and the millionaire, respectively, flopped with the voters they claimed to champion. Platner performed pitifully among voters without college degrees, and El-Sayed is floundering with black voters. So who exactly is the working class? Traditionally, the term meant physical labor and no four-year degree: the blue-collar worker, and now, its pastel-hued cousin, the pink-collar worker: nurses, teachers, and clerical staff. It turns out that this is the demographic least likely to vote Democrat. Leftist candidates have tried valiantly to stretch the definition of “working class” to fit their own membership rolls: social workers, public sector employees, non-profit staffers. The rest of the DSA’s ranks are filled out by white-collar professionals, career academics, and the unemployed or disabled. Checks out. You can spot the type just by scanning a DSA meeting. These rooms aren’t overflowing with the builders, the innovators, the creators, or the doers. Rather, they more closely resemble a theater-kid-anonymous meeting: the debt-ridden, the disabled, the desperately overdramatic underemployed, or some combination of all three. They aren’t making a lot of cash, and they are furious at the people who are. Republican voters are seeing the exact opposite scenario unfold. About 60% of voters with a high school education or less, but whose households earned $60,000 or more, preferred Trump to the Democratic field. And no wonder. Electricians and plumbers now pull a median salary north of $62,000, and the construction industry alone needs roughly 349,000 net new workers in 2026 just to keep up. Wages in the trades are climbing faster than the national average, precisely because nobody wants to do the work anymore. So the guy who skipped the seminar on intersectionality to learn how to wire a breaker box is out here making bank, no student loans attached, while his master’s degree-holding classmate is still waiting for the revolution to cover rent. Across all the data, one thing rings true. If you’re highly educated yet chronically broke, you’re likely to describe yourself as “very liberal.” Also, the paler the skin and the more neon the hair, the more likely the “very liberal” self-diagnosis. (That last one I made up, but it sounds right.) And it all makes a certain grim sense. These are people who exit the ivory towers right around the time their hair starts graying, aged out by years of protesting, pronoun-swapping, and experimenting with every imagined sexuality under the sun. They felt more consequential holding a megaphone and chanting numbingly banal slogans through a cloth mask than they ever will at their actual job. So they leave the private sector (extra credit if they never set foot in it to begin with) and either run for office themselves or raise money for their equally bored friends already working in government. They’re angry that their matcha costs nine dollars and that it takes an arm and a leg just for a yoga instructor to tell them to “shavasana” 40 times in 50 minutes. They’re angry that the kid they went to high school with owns two houses and has a family of four by 27, because he went into the trades, while they got saddled with gender studies debt. They’re angry at anyone who became successful, unable to fathom why that person isn’t losing sleep over the nonexistent genocide in Gaza or the equally nonexistent genocide of trans people down the block. It comes down to what these voters are prioritizing. They care about the cost of living and making everything free via socialism because they’re strapped for cash and too lazy to change their own situations. They care about “democracy” because they’ve been told Republicans are eating it alive, even as Democrats keep installing candidates in primaries who never earned a single vote and campaign on abolishing the filibuster and the Senate along with it. They care about healthcare and strangling business with regulation because they have nothing else to do but complain and dismantle the capitalist machine that gave them the medicine, the treatment, and the care they’re currently benefiting from. High-earning Republicans, meanwhile, generally care about putting food on the table, getting through the workday, and showing up for their community at church, at synagogue, or on the sidelines of their kid’s rec league soccer game. Then they turn on the news and learn the Socialists want to tax more of their paycheck. This isn’t new. Every revolutionary movement in history has been built by the entitled, educated, and downwardly mobile, who have both the time and the grievance to spare. The more productive thing would be for every gender studies major in America to shadow an electrician for a week. Nothing cures elite overproduction and the rise of socialism quite like creating something of actual value to society. Because the reality is, capitalism didn’t fail these overly educated, undercapitalized, insufferable pinkos, their major did.

A Florida pastor has sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT repeatedly discouraged him from seeking professional medical care before he nearly died from a pulmonary embolism.  Scott Winters, who led a congregation at a Florida church before his health crisis, claims ChatGPT provided “extremely dangerous medical recommendations,” according to a lawsuit covered by the New York Times. As Winters experienced early stages of a pulmonary embolism, a potentially life-threatening blood clot in the lungs, he turned to ChatGPT for advice.  Using ChatGPT-4o, released in May 2024, Winters initially received recommendations to seek professional medical care. But according to the lawsuit, those warnings stopped providing disclaimers as the conversations continued. Medical AI researcher Dr. Adam Rodman described the allegations as a “nightmare scenario.” The lawsuit alleges ChatGPT eventually told Winters that his symptoms were “not something dangerous” and that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”  As Winters began experiencing dizzy spells, including one that forced him to stop a sermon, friends encouraged him to seek medical attention. He told ChatGPT that “the people in my church think I’m crazy for not going to the hospital,” but the chatbot reassured Winters and instructed him to “take it easy,” certain he would recover in time. The chatbot also allegedly told Winters that resetting his nervous system at home with its help was a decision “most people simply don’t understand,” according to the New York Times.   Winters’ health continued to worsen as he spent much of his time in his recliner because he became too dizzy to stand. The lawsuit alleges ChatGPT continued to “downplay” his symptoms while offering “specific regimens for prescription medications.”  After experiencing severe groin pain in July 2025, ChatGPT allegedly told Winters it was “very likely another minor piece of the long story.” Hours later, he was rushed to intensive care with a massive pulmonary embolism, according to the New York Times. Doctors later told Winters that his earlier dizzy spells were likely symptoms of smaller pulmonary embolisms and that the blood clots may have worsened after weeks of reclining, the lawsuit claims. As a result of the pulmonary embolism, Winters required weeks of assistance with “standing, eating, dressing and using the bathroom” and will face years of “intensive physical and psychological recovery,” according to the lawsuit.  More than 40 million people ask ChatGPT health-related questions daily. While the newer chatbot models include additional safeguards, experts told the Times that lengthy conversations can sometimes weaken those protections. Rodman said newer models make scenarios like Winters’ less likely but warned AI systems could still fail in ways researchers have not yet anticipated.