Positive views of capitalism among American adults have hit a record low of 54%. Sixty-five percent say the country is headed in the wrong direction. And 54% of Americans say they have little to no confidence in the FBI to investigate Charlie Kirk’s assassination impartially. Support for this nation is eroding, and it’s being accelerated not just by the predictable agitators on the Left, but increasingly by figures on the horseshoe Right. Tucker Carlson sits at the center of this grievance party phenomenon, where progressive socialists and former-right podcasters converge to paint a portrait of a broken America. As someone whose friends and colleagues are being pulled in by these takes, it’s time we acknowledge that “just asking questions” has gone too far, it’s tiring, and it’s doing real damage. Carlson has been telling audiences that the American capitalist system is “completely doomed,” made up of a “corrupt oligarchy” that hoards wealth while destroying the working class. He says this with the same energy as Hasan Piker and Bernie Sanders. You can dress it up in flannel, a navy blazer, or a Twitch hoodie — the message is still a lie. The U.S. unemployment rate sits at 4.3%. Prime-age labor force participation is at a multi-decade high. Young people are not “screwed,” they’re competing in the most dynamic economy on earth. Over the last century, free markets lifted America to the world’s largest GDP, providing the tax base for infrastructure, defense, and schools. Because companies compete for your money, they are forced to innovate. That competitive drive gives you the internet, the iPhone, and medical treatments keeping your grandparents alive. The American Dream exists because capitalism rewards labor, skill, and entrepreneurship, regardless of starting point. Tucker even wants to thwart capitalism’s future. He told Ben Shapiro he would ban self-driving cars to protect Midwest truckers — a specious position that would cost the rest of us dearly. Autonomous vehicles are projected to cut logistics costs 30–50%, add upwards of $70 billion to the GDP, and create high-skilled jobs in software, fleet management, and data analytics. Tractors didn’t kill farming; they multiplied output, allowing farmers to do more with less, and freed labor for entirely new industries. Every major innovation follows that same pattern. Short-term disruption equals massive long-term gains for everyone. Tucker’s demagoguery doesn’t save families; it raises prices, slows growth, and guarantees the stagnation he claims to hate. His position is not conservative. It is the exact mirror of the grievance-party Left. Tucker’s worldview, that nefarious forces are conspiring against the American people, doesn’t stop at the economy. In his recent New York Times interview, he stated explicitly that President Donald Trump “had no choice” but to join Israel in striking Iran, calling him “more a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker.” He claims Israel, Jewish donors, and evangelical Christians control U.S. foreign policy. He said Citibank poses a bigger threat to Americans than Hamas and Hezbollah. When asked about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — a proven 1903 forgery by Russian secret police — he waved it off: “I don’t know what that is. I’ve heard references to it. It’s like czarist forgery or something.” There’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, Trump’s decision to strike Iran was driven by the nuclear and ballistic missile threat that the Islamic regime posed and a decades-long urge to take out the world’s largest funder of terrorism, which had been bullying America and her allies for decades. That is America First. That is not some slavish loyalty to Tel Aviv. Trump defied neocons, pressured NATO, brokered the Abraham Accords without a single American troop, and has repeatedly pressured Netanyahu to stand down. He is not anyone’s puppet. He never has been. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbies like every other interest group, including Saudi Arabia, Big Tech, and public sector unions. There is no evidence of “control.” Tucker’s “spell” and “hostage” language is the same occult-tinged conspiracy he once mocked when it came from the Left. As for the Protocols, that document was debunked in 1921 by The Times of London, weaponized by the Nazis to justify genocide, and has zero basis in reality. Tucker knows this. His “I don’t know” is not intellectual humility. It is a deliberate wink. There are 15 million Jewish people worldwide, 6 million of whom live in America among 340 million citizens. Jewish Americans succeed through the same merit, education, and entrepreneurship available to everyone. If you want to talk about foreign influence operations, look at Qatar funding Ivy League campuses, Chinese influence in our social media ecosystem, and Shanghai billionaires funding anti-American protest movements. Those are documented. Those are real. On Citibank being a threat to Americans…there was a Hezbollah-linked shooting in Michigan last month, and I use Capital One, pay my bills, and budget monthly. So no, Citibank isn’t keeping me up at night, and if it does for Tucker, I would suggest he lay off the ALP pouches. Tucker’s final avenue for institutional sabotage is the FBI’s handling of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Listen, friends, I understand why many of us are skeptical of the FBI. Both President Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s DOJ weaponized federal power against conservative leaders, grandmothers, and a sitting president in ways this country had never seen. That consequential distrust was justified, but here the goalposts have moved to an unrecognizable place: Trump is in office, Kash Patel is running the FBI, Dan Bongino walked out and told us everything, and somehow, even now, it’s all still a cover-up. At some point, the conspiracy has to end, and the evidence has to begin. The fact is that Tyler Robinson’s guilt is overwhelming. Prosecutors have matched DNA on the rifle trigger, the towel wrapped around the bolt-action, and the spent casing to Robinson. ATF ballistics confirmed the weapon. Before the shooting, Robinson wrote a letter to his roommate stating he “had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.” He posted confessions on Discord. Video placed him on the Utah Valley University campus hours before the shot. He surrendered voluntarily within 33 hours after his father tipped off authorities. The investigation wasn’t sabotaged; it was solved. Carlson isn’t defending Kirk’s legacy. He’s exploiting a martyr’s death to erode trust in the institutions conservatives fought to reclaim. Carlson has been transparent about where this is all heading. He wants a new political party: isolationist on foreign policy, restrictionist on immigration, and — crucially — interventionist in the economy. Ben Shapiro identified it correctly: that’s a National Socialist Party, and history has a unanimous verdict on that experiment. Every government that has tried centrally managed economies — the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Venezuela, Cuba — followed the same arc. First, they promise protection from the chaos of the market. Then, they pick winners and losers. Next, shortages, stagnation, and repression follow, inevitably. The Soviet Union’s GDP per capita in 1990, after 70 years of central planning, was one-seventh of America’s. Venezuela, once the wealthiest country in Latin America, saw its economy collapse 75% between 2013 and 2021 after nationalizing industries and freezing prices. These aren’t outliers, they’re the rule. Carlson’s “carve-outs” for truckers and banks are just the polite, populist entry point to a far uglier destination. Here is the uncomfortable truth about why we’re even having this conversation: America is so extraordinarily prosperous that we have the luxury of entertaining these ideas. Our poor have air conditioning. Our working class has smartphones. Our life expectancy, even accounting for recent dips, is historically high. When you’ve never known genuine scarcity — not theoretical scarcity, but Cuban-pharmacy-shelf scarcity — it becomes very easy to romanticize the idea that the system is rigged. That’s precisely the audience Carlson is playing to: comfortable enough to be frustrated, not desperate enough to remember what actually fails. Tucker Carlson is not a conservative. He’s not America First. He is Tucker Carlson First. He’s a man who has found that grievance sells, that “just asking questions” about Jewish cabals and FBI cover-ups generates more clicks than defending the free market ever will. His brand is built on the premise that America is broken. He loses his audience if America heals. That is not patriotism. That is a business model. Reagan proved the alternative. Trump is proving it again. Free markets, applied honestly, have produced the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. They’ve lifted over a billion people out of it in the last three decades alone. Strong borders, enforced consistently, are not racist; they’re necessary. An America First foreign policy means striking Iran when our nation is threatened, not when Tel Aviv asks. Rejecting antisemitic conspiracy theories is not defending Israel — it’s defending logic, because 15 million people do not secretly run a planet of 8 billion. Sorry. Tucker Carlson is a talented broadcaster who chose the wrong hill to die on. He can come back, but until he does, I would treat his content the way you’d treat a teenager having a tantrum: acknowledge the emotion, reject the premise, and don’t let her near the car keys.

California Democrat Rep. Jim Costa faced a probe over allegations that he made inappropriate advances toward interns, according to a new report.  A former House Democrat staffer filed a complaint in 2023 accusing Costa of making unwanted advances toward her in February 2020 when she interned for a different lawmaker, NOTUS reported Monday. The complaint was later dismissed by the House Ethics Committee and the Office of Congressional Conduct after they found they did not have sufficient evidence to proceed.  The revelation comes amid a flurry of sexual misconduct claims involving members of Congress. Former Reps. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) resigned last month over claims of sexual misconduct. Costa has denied any suggestion of wrongdoing, pointing to the conclusions of ethics investigators. One incident involving Costa allegedly took place during an event at the California State Society when the woman was 22, and he was 67. The woman told the Office of Congressional Conduct that Costa approached her outside the event as she got ready to leave and tried to get her to stay before he asked her to dance with him. “First, he greeted me, and then said, are you here alone? I said, yes. I said, I’m waiting for my bag. I’m going home. He said, oh no, why would you go home? It’s such a nice night. Don’t you want to dance? I was like, I’ve already danced. He’s like, well, I didn’t dance with you,” she told investigators.  The woman then said he asked her if she “knew how to shimmy.” She said she did, and they danced while she waited to leave.  “Every time I leaned back, it seemed like he got farther forward. So I was grateful that I could do a back bend. It was a very uncomfortable situation,” she said.  “That’s a scary situation. Especially when you’re an intern and you don’t know what relationships that you could mess up,” she added. “Yeah, I guess he started the conversation. I was gracious and responded. And then he immediately asked me to shimmy. I don’t know about you, but it’s a very sexual and awkward dance move.” The woman later claimed that Costa gave her his personal cell phone number and told her he could help with her career or grab dinner sometime. During a later encounter, the woman said that he asked if she was dating and later ghosted her after she proposed they meet for coffee instead of dinner.  The woman told NOTUS she only filed the complaint when she felt like her career had enough “cachet” to survive any fallout. She also recounted another incident where he allegedly danced closely with another young intern at a California State Society event. The woman said she and another person broke up the dancing.  Costa’s office pointed NOTUS to the dismissal of the allegations by ethics investigators.  “Rep. Costa fully cooperated with a review conducted by [OCC] and the House Committee on Ethics several years ago. The OCC recommended dismissal, and the Ethics Committee unanimously voted to dismiss the matter,” his office said. “The actions of the OCC and the Ethics Committee speak for themselves.” Four decades ago, Costa issued an apology after he was cited for soliciting a prostitute while traveling in a state-leased vehicle with a prostitute, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The Daily Wire’s “Morning Wire” podcast received the coveted “Outstanding Podcast” award, and Daily Wire immigration reporter Jennie Taer won the title of “Outstanding Reporter,” the Media Research Center announced on Tuesday. Morning Wire was praised for its “concise, professionally produced alternative to legacy media” as the daily podcast has remained consistent with its promise to deliver “15 minutes of what matters, nothing that doesn’t.” “Featuring reporting from on-the-ground journalists and interviews with expert guests, hosts Georgia Howe and John Bickley guide listeners through the day’s most important stories without the ideological filter common in traditional outlets,” MRC said. Since 2021, Morning Wire has covered the biggest stories around the world in a common-sense approach to news. Since then, Morning Wire has expanded into providing evening updates, weekend interviews, and deep dives. Daily Wire reporter Jennie Taer, who has extensively covered illegal immigrant crime and President Donald Trump’s deportation operation, was recognized “as a leading voice in immigration reporting.” MRC awarded Taer for her coverage of the migrant gang crisis in Aurora, Colorado, which she also covered for The New York Post before joining The Daily Wire. Taer was also recognized for her reporting at the frontlines of Trump’s deportation effort in Minneapolis, where she spent a day with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during the height of the administration’s operation in the Twin Cities. “This year’s Media Research Center Bulldog Award winners stand in stark contrast to the elitist media’s herd mentality,” said MRC President David Bozell. “These courageous journalists refuse to follow the pack, choosing instead to deliver truth over narrative, facts over favoritism, and accountability over activism. They represent the best of American journalism — independent, fearless, and committed to informing the public rather than manipulating it.” The Media Research Center presents awards to conservative journalists, columnists, and podcast hosts each year. The Daily Wire is the only organization that has won in each of the five years that MRC has handed out MRC Bulldog Awards, NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck pointed out. In 2025, former Daily Wire investigative reporter Spencer Lindquist won MRC’s “Outstanding Blogger” award for his reporting on Colony Ridge in Texas. In 2024, Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro and journalist Kassy Akiva were named the winners of the “Outstanding Podcast” and “Outstanding Blogger” awards, respectively. Daily Wire host Matt Walsh was awarded “Outstanding Podcast” in 2023, and Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Rosiak won the “Outstanding Investigative Journalism” award in 2022. Other winners for this year’s MRC Bulldog Awards include Dana Loesch for “Outstanding Radio Talk Show Host,” Douglas Murray for “Outstanding Columnist,” and Washington, D.C., local news reporter Nick Minock for “Outstanding Investigative Journalist.”

The judge who apologized to the gunman accused of attempting to assassinate President Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner released a man who attacked a member of Congress and has “devoted” his career to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.  Public backlash is now intensifying against Judge Zia Faruqui who grilled jail officials on Monday over the conditions Cole Allen, the suspect, has faced behind bars. “I’m sorry,” Faruqui told Allen, who was reportedly held in solitary confinement. “Whatever you’ve been through, I apologize for the prior week,” The Daily Wire previously reported.  Jail officials placed Allen on a temporary suicide watch that required 24-hour-a-day placement in a padded cell. The judge complained that those measures were punitive and not based on a medical assessment.  “Welcome to Washington, DC, where U.S. Magistrate Judge Faruqui believes a defendant armed to the teeth and attempting to assassinate the president is entitled to preferential treatment in his confinement compared to every other defendant,” Pirro posted on social media.  Welcome to Washington, DC, where U.S. Magistrate Judge Faruqui believes a defendant armed to the teeth and attempting to assassinate the president is entitled to preferential treatment in his confinement compared to every other defendant. https://t.co/EPtqJgXjnb — Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) May 4, 2026 “Will Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui be visiting the WHCA shooter in jail to offer him a cold beverage?” Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) asked on X.  Faruqui’s conduct on the bench has sparked intense outrage and is now prompting some elected officials to scrutinize his judicial record. “This is the same judge who tried to release the man who beat up Congresswoman Angie Craig despite 25 bench warrants,” Senator Tim Sheehy said on social media. “Judge Faruqui should be in jail, not on the bench.” This is the same judge who tried to release the man who beat up Congresswoman Angie Craig despite 25 bench warrants. Judge Faruqui should be in jail, not on the bench. https://t.co/gKVMnfWaNS pic.twitter.com/EgIHHhYO1a — Tim Sheehy (@TimSheehyMT) May 5, 2026 In 2023, Faruqui, against the wishes of prosecutors, ordered the release of a man accused of assaulting Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) in her Washington, D.C., apartment elevator.  Kendrick Hamlin allegedly punched Craig in the chin and grabbed her by the shoulder in an early morning attack. The Democratic congresswoman escaped after pouring hot coffee on the suspect, according to the New York Post.  “To say this is a close call is not doing it justice. This is an extremely close call,” Faruqui said at the time.  Faruqui, who has also presided over January 6 cases, bemoaned that the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting suspect was being held under harsher conditions and treated more severely than those defendants, who were housed in a lower-security section of the jail known as the Central Treatment Facility. “A lot of people have seemed to forget about Jan. 6, but I have not,” Faruqui said, according to CNBC. “Pardons erase convictions but do not erase history.” Couy Griffin, a former New Mexico county commissioner who founded the political group “Cowboys for Trump,” was sentenced to 14 days behind bars for a misdemeanor trespass charge. Griffin entered a restricted area on January 6, 2021, but never entered the Capitol, according to NBC News.  “This same judge fought to keep me locked up in solitary confinement on a misdemeanor trespass charge where I stood peacefully OUTSIDE The Capitol,” Griffin said of Judge Faruqui. “He is evil!” Griffin said in another social media post. “I was sentenced to two weeks yet spent three weeks in solitary confinement. All because of him!!” Before becoming a magistrate judge, Faruqui served as an assistant U.S. attorney from 2008 to 2020, according to his public LinkedIn profile. He earned his bachelor’s and law degrees from Georgetown University. The Georgetown Pakistan Public Policy Conclave and the Muslim Bar Association of New York have pages highlighting Faruqui’s career.  “As the first Muslim Judge to be appointed to the Federal Court in Washington D.C., Judge Faruqui has also devoted much of his career to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts,” reads a letter from the Washington Council of Lawyers supporting his nomination to the District Court of Columbia.  The 2023 letter states that Judge Faruqui has “led efforts to reform the criminal justice system.” Monday’s hearing is not the first time Faruqui has tussled with the Department of Justice. Seven months ago, he claimed the DOJ had lost credibility under the Trump administration, which provoked a fiery response from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.  “Judge Faruqui has never really met someone with an illegal gun that he hasn’t felt some compassion for,” Pirro said at the time. “He should do his job as a judge and leave his politics out of it.” Authorities say Cole Thomas Allen, 31, was armed with a shotgun, handgun, and knives when he charged through a security checkpoint inside the Washington Hilton Hotel, where the WHCD was being held. One floor above the ballroom packed with government officials and reporters, Allen discharged one of his weapons, striking a Secret Service agent before falling to the ground. If convicted, he faces life in prison.

“Fly me to the moon,” Frank Sinatra sang in 1964, “Let me play among the stars.” The song was recorded more than 100 times before Sinatra’s version appeared on his album, It Might as Well Be Swing. It was released one year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. In another five years, Sinatra’s recording would play on a Sony TC-50 portable cassette player on the Apollo 10 mission, which orbited the Moon in May 1969. It was fitting that the biggest star in American entertainment — the Chairman of the Board, the leader of the Rat Pack, Mr. Las Vegas and Palm Springs — with those electric blue eyes and buttery voice, would lend his singular vocals to the mid-20th century’s consummate moment. Pop culture meets celebrity meets the American Space Cowboy in one bold, frontier-expanding, mind-blowing, breathtaking, victorious, seemingly impossible starburst adventure into the heavens themselves. What happened to us? Space, that final frontier, is overshadowed by the perpetual glow of screens and the mind-crushing, unimaginative “creator class” more interested in monetizing people’s brain synapses through cat memes and AI slop bots. At one time, astronauts ruled the covers of glossy magazines, nightly newscasts, and film reels. The nation hung breathlessly on NASA updates during our Cold War battle with the Soviet Union. It was a unique convergence of nerd-meets-jock as America’s brightest minds built a pathway to space helmed by the country’s daredevil real-life rocket men who practically double-dog dared each other to blow Death himself a kiss behind the throttles of experimental planes as post-WWII test pilots. These men had the Right Stuff, and Americans were cheering them every step of the way because the very existence of the free world and the American way of life was at stake. At the time, astronauts and just about anyone in NASA’s orbit could be included in the celebrity-hero category. Even astronauts’ wives piqued the American people’s curiosity and subsequent press coverage. They were the first “Real Housewives,” but with a more wholesome, patriotic plotline. Now, famous-for-being-famous is the truthism of our time. Celebrity is not much more than a slurry of performative indulgence, self-important fame whoring, and personal branding. One needs to look at Jeff Bezos’s foray into civilian space travel to see this in action. It was a real cast of characters in the worst all-female remake of a space adventure imaginable. The Girl Power Space Cadets — launched into a few minutes of weightlessness via the Blue Origin spacecraft — were powered by Bezos, who seems plenty happy to orbit his wife’s celestial spheres and send her, in a nod to Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners character Ralph Kramden, “To the moon!” in addition to making those same celebs angry about buying his way into Monday evening’s Met Gala. What’s a billionaire to do? No, these aren’t heroes, and they barely qualify as celebrities, even by today’s standards. The real astronauts, the ones who should be cruising down New York City’s Fifth Avenue in a ticker-tape parade, who should be invited to speak at every college and university commencement address this graduation season, who should be the star of every party and never have to buy a beer at one ever again, are the Artemis II astronauts. Sure, they didn’t actually land on the moon, but they reached farther into the depths of space than any human ever. They witnessed the Earth set behind the moon. They didn’t listen to Dark Side of the Moon; they experienced it. It was the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972, and everyone just shrugged. In fact, when the four-man crew (Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Jeremy Hansen, and Reid Wiseman) recently appeared in the Oval Office standing behind President Donald Trump, not a single question was directed at them by the press. The late comedian-prophet Norm Macdonald is nodding with knowing disappointment from the great beyond. Even when the press asks the Artemis II crew questions, they center on an identity-based narrative rather than the enormity of the accomplishment. To his credit, Victor Glover has redirected this messaging toward an American experience and achievement rather than on his being a black man. We should expect as much from the press and fame ecosystem, where what passes for being a celebrity or an admired entertainer is their “influencer” status. Ask kids these days what career path they aspire to, and influencer is the safe (non-porn-adjacent) answer. If you were to take a time machine and travel back to, say, 1955 and explain that, Yes! We made it to the moon. By golly, we even hit a few golf balls while we were there. And no, not every little Jimmy and Susan aspires to explore the thing that has captured mankind’s imagination for eons and been a reference point for everything from classic literature, science fiction film and television, art and design, and even automobiles and ladies’ undergarments. Kennedy implored his fellow Americans to reach the moon before 1970. In his 1962 address at Rice University about the nation’s efforts into space, he declared, “This country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward — and so will space.” Kennedy’s words are a reminder that the American spirit is the driver of great things. The soul of an American yearns for a challenge, to meet what lies beyond the horizon, and to push beyond the quiet complacency of mediocre content dished out to us. We mustn’t accept our exceptionalism as a characteristic of a bygone era. What we should do is turn on Sinatra, gaze up at space, and “See what spring is like, On Jupiter and Mars.”