The State of the Union speech is an effective annual exercise to measure how journalists feel about a long speech on national TV by Donald Trump. They hate it intensely, like most children hate broccoli. They would like to scrape that steaming plate into the garbage. The New York Times published a front-page editorial by White House reporter Katie Rogers  – lamely labeled as “News Analysis.” It came under the headline “Casting Democrats as Villains, Trump Produces a Spectacle.” You can sense their outrage. Nobody should darkly cast Democrats as villains, especially the people Democrats relentlessly suggest are authoritarians out to end our democracy, but only after they starve children and close hospitals. Like a good Democrat, Rogers insisted Republicans find themselves in a “politically treacherous moment,” while Democrats are “seeing polling moving their way” and “remain confident about the midterm elections.” The usual midterm election trends should inspire confidence, as well as all the partisan “news” products. Liberal outlets sent out their pollsters to find that Trump has “gone too far” on immigration, taken the country in “the wrong direction,” and has all the wrong “priorities.” Their pollsters are always going to keep the “vibes” high for Democrats and paint dark clouds over the Republicans in any election season. They tried in 2024, but the people ruined it for the pollsters. They also pile on Republicans with their so-called “independent fact-checkers.” They pounce relentlessly on Trump, aerobically implying to the public that you can’t believe a word Trump says about anything. They’re trying to put the oomph behind this Jimmy Fallon joke: “Trump’s speech focused on his major accomplishments, and when those eight seconds were up, he just riffed for an hour and a half.” The New York Times and the Associated Press published “fact checks” of Trump before his speech was even made available to the public. When it was over, Times “fact checker” Linda Qiu and other Times staffers posted 29 fact checks about Trump, and they used 20 of them to fill up an entire page of the paper. Online, they had just one note on Virginia Gov. Abby Spanberger, who was assigned the Democrat response – but she was touted as correct. Overall, I found in a quick review of the “fact checks” after Trump’s speech there were 123 for the president and just four for Spanberger – and all four of those ruled the new governor as factual. PolitiFact has featured only six fact checks on Spanberger over her career, and only one was a False. Aren’t they nice? Democrats feel free to unload attack lines that are untrue on their face, like this one from Spanberger’s rebuke: “Our President told us tonight that we are safer because these agents arrest mothers and detain children.” Did Trump literally say “we’re safe because ICE agents arrest mothers and detain children”? No. But everything is fair game when a Democrat is boiling up rhetoric. Your “independent fact checkers” say nothing when Trump is compared to Hitler and the Republicans are compared to the Nazis. Democrats yelled from the House floor that Trump “killed Americans” who interfered with ICE, and no one objected. They exploded in outrage when a Republican congressman yelled “You lie” at President Obama at the 2009 State of the Union, but “you killed Americans” is considered fair. This latest address to Congress underlines the elitist media should not be considered a reliable source in describing which actors in politics are practicing honesty and decency, promoting unity and a bipartisan spirit. They offer none of those qualities in their work. 

The struggle session continues apace, as the Elitist Media continue to pummel the gold-medal winning U.S. Men’s Hockey Team for having the temerity to A: patriotically celebrate their gold medal B: pound beers with FBI Director Kash Patel and C: talk to President Donald Trump and accept his invites to both hang out at The White House and attend the State of the Union. Now ABC has joined this effort, with a report that is as bad as one would expect. Watch as correspondent Will Reeve’s video package makes a significant omission: How bad-faith is ABC's struggle session reporting on USA Men's Hockey? Note what's missing between the subtitles of the first and second Trump statements: the men's team speaking out in support of the women getting invited to The White House. WILL REEVE: Minutes after their… pic.twitter.com/6dcngT3bnO — Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) February 27, 2026 WILL REEVE: Minutes after their triumph on the ice, FBI director Kash Patel joining the men's players in the locker room putting President Trump on the phone, who invited them to The White House and the State of the Union. DONALD TRUMP: We’re gonna have to bring the women's team. You do know that, right? USA MEN’S HOCKEY PLAYERS: Absolutely. Two for Two! Two for Two! TRUMP: I do believe I would probably be impeached, OK? Viewers watching the subtitles on TV did not view the players’ statements in support of the women’s team getting invited to The White House. These statements are key to the entire domestic narrative surrounding Team USA- the idea that the men’s team just laughed at President Donald Trump’s joke about inviting the women, without making any statement of support.  We’re very intentional in clarifying that there is a domestic narrative because the Canadian sports media are very mad as well, although their objections seem based on the players’ audacity to hang with Trump after his statements on annexation, tariffs, and other items. Or, reductio ad absurdum, just being in the general presence of Trump. Either way, the media seem bent on putting Team USA through the wringer. After his transcript sleight-of-hand, Reeve showcases a couple of players that have been browbeaten into apologizing, closes out with the captain of the women’s team and casts doubt about whether the women will actually go to The White House. This whole cycle is stupid and can’t end soon enough, but is highly instructive inasmuch as it exposes the bitterness of the Elitist Media and its collective recoil at the idea of American triumphalism. They probably rooted for Canada. Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on ABC World News Tonight on Thursday, February 26th, 2026: DAVID MUIR: Back at home tonight, the men and women's U.S. hockey teams, Olympic champions and tonight what some members of the men's team are now saying about that locker room laughter, the president's joke, and what they want everyone to know, particularly the women's team. Here is Will Reeve. WILL REEVE: As Team USA's men's hockey team celebrates their Olympic gold medal, tonight many of the players giving the gold medal-winning U.S. women's team their shine as well. JACK HUGHES: I’m so proud and I’m so happy that the men's and women's USA hockey teams brought gold medals back to the United States of America. REEVE: Minutes after their triumph on the ice, FBI director Kash Patel joining the men's players in the locker room putting President Trump on the phone, who invited them to The White House and the State of the Union. DONALD TRUMP: We’re gonna have to bring the women's team. You do know that, right? USA MEN’S HOCKEY PLAYERS: Absolutely. Two for Two! Two for Two! TRUMP: I do believe I would probably be impeached, OK? REEVE: Now some of those players regret their locker room laughter. CHARLIE McAVOY: Certainly sorry for how we responded to it in that moment. You know, things that just happened really quick there and if you know the men's team and if you know the relationships that we have, the amount of time we have spent, you know, with the women’s team and how we supported them, it's certainly not reflective of how we feel. REEVE: Goalie Jeremy Swayman saying this. JEREMY SWAYMAN: We should have reacted differently. We know that we are so excited for the women's team, we have so much respect for the women's team. To share that gold medal with them is something that we are forever grateful for. REEVE: Tonight women's team captain Hilary Knight reacting to the president's joke. HILARY KNIGHT: I thought it was sort of a distasteful joke and unfortunately that is overshadowing a lot of the success. We are trying to focus on celebrating the women in our room. REEVE: David, we saw the U.S. men's team visit The White House and attend the State of the Union on Tuesday. The women's team declined the president's invitation, citing over commitments. The president says that a White House visit from the women's team is in the works, but so far nothing appears to be scheduled. David. MUIR: This country celebrating the men and the women tonight and Will Reeve, we thank you.

Dave Zirin, who is allegedly the sports editor for the hard-left political magazine The Nation when he’s not issuing nasty, virulently anti-Israel takes, co-wrote “The Ugly Underbelly of the US Hockey Victory” with political science professor Jules Boykoff. After the U.S. hockey team’s thrilling, gold-medal winning overtime win over arch-rivals Canada, the president of the United States called to congratulate them and they had a friendly, jokey chat. That’s all it took to make leftist heads like Zirin's explode, burning up any patina of professed patriotism they may have previously claimed. He was the latest bitter leftist to condemn the team for apparently not hanging up on the president of the United States or making a political statement after their athletic triumph. The US Olympic hockey team beat Canada 2–1 in overtime in the gold medal game at the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics on Sunday. The Canadian team showed up angry. Our neighbors to the north were upset because of how bellicose and erratic President Donald Trump has been toward the nation he proposed making the 51st state. …. As for Team USA, it was ready to fight—literally—because Trump had deemed Canada, Canadian Bacon—style, the enemy, and the players were ready to follow orders. The US squad was chock-full of Trump supporters who were more than willing to provide a photo op for Vice President JD Vance and the embarrassing FBI director, Kash Patel. Surely Zirin doesn’t think the team needed Trump to inspire them to beat their nemesis to the North? Or for hockey players to engage in fighting on the ice? Zirin's medals of honor were instead reserved for the Olympic athletes who displayed petulant anti-Trumper antics. He unloaded two offensive paragraphs, one insulting the hockey team, the other former President Ronald Reagan. Unlike other US Olympians speaking out against this regime, men’s hockey players chose to be lickspittles. In that regard, this hockey team is part of a rather ignominious USA hockey gold-medal tradition. A fan at the 2026 Milano Cortina Games donned a hockey sweater with “1980” emblazoned across the chest, the year a US hockey team became a legendary symbol of national unity. But in the years that followed, Republicans have used that legend to sow division. The Nation writer, not content to ruin the 2026 Olympic champs, reached back to smear the 1980 hockey squad that upset the Soviet Union on the way to winning the gold, as well as Reagan. ….Pundits turned the victory into a right-wing symbol. It showed that the country had moved away from the social struggles of the 1960s and ’70s and embraced the crypto-fascist variant of patriotism best exemplified in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. Zirin of course preferred athlete Eileen Gu, the American-born and educated skier who competed for Communist China. He concluded about the anti-Trump athletes: “But the solidarity proffered by fellow Olympians was heartening. This is a pick-a-side moment in the United States, and they picked the right one.” At The Nation, that "right side" is never the side of the United States.

Near the end of Wednesday’s Katy Tur Reports, Slate writer Mark Joseph Stern absurdly claimed the recent Supreme Court Ruling in United States Postal Service vs. Kanan could lead to mail-in ballots in a “liberal enclave” being destroyed through an apparent Department of Justice and USPS conspiracy. The Supreme Court’s five-to-four ruling prevented the postal service from being held legally responsible for postal workers going postal intentionally not delivering or mishandling the mail. But, MS NOW host Katy Tur and Stern took the case outcome as an opportunity to spread more fear of a mythical Trump administration scheme to collude with the USPS to interfere in the 2026 Midterm Election. Stern recently wrote a piece where he decried the ruling. After Tur asked what impact the ruling would have on mail-in Ballots, Stern started to connect it back to a seeming postal worker scheme: Well, it's pretty disturbing because this liability for the government, if mail ballots are intentionally withheld or destroyed, was a key deterrent against, kind of, interference with mail voting by postal workers, which has been an issue in the past. Postal workers have been prosecuted and jailed for interfering with mail ballots. They could refuse to deliver mail ballots. They could refuse to pick up and return mail ballots, say, from a liberal enclave in a swing state.     Tur then presented examples of postal workers deliberate destruction of ballots in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Florida: In New Jersey in 2021, a DOJ says a postal employee admits dumping mail, including election ballots sent to West Orange residents. In Kentucky in 2020, a U.S. Postal Service employee was charged for throwing out mail, including more than 100 absentee ballots. And in Florida, in 2024 a postal worker was accused of throwing a ballot and election mail into the woods. “99 million ballots were mailed in 2024 and processed by USPS, by the postal service,” she warned. But the truth that they were obfuscating was the fact that the case was only about suing the government for the actions of the individual workers. As noted in SCOTUSBlog: Specifically, the justices were asked to resolve a disagreement between the federal courts of appeals over the scope of the FTCA’s postal exception, which protects the government from suits “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.” The government contended that the postal exception bars Konan’s claims, because intentional nondelivery of mail is a form of “loss” or “miscarriage.” Konan, on the other hand, argued that the postal exception doesn’t cover intentional acts. So wait, the Department of Justice could still charge people for destroying ballots? Well of course they could. The premise of Stern’s conspiracy was based on the allegation that the DOJ would turn a blind eye on postal workers, the group represented by a union that had constantly endorsed democrats: So look, that is true. But we would be relying on Donald Trump's Department of Justice to bring those criminal charges. We would be relying on his handpicked prosecutors, who say that they work on behalf of the president to charge postal workers who destroy ballots. And unfortunately, I didn't think we'd reach this point so quickly, I am not confident that this justice department, under the direct control of Trump, would bring charges against a postal worker who say, refused to deliver mail ballots to some liberal area.  He continued on with complaints about the politicization of the department in “unprecedented ways” and explained he doesn’t “a lot of confidence” in how the DOJ might prosecute postal workers. Again, according to Stern, the group well-known for definitely not being made up of conservative Trump supporters, federal postal workers, will conspire to throw away only liberal ballots in order for Republicans to win, and then the DOJ will not charge them, even though they have in the past. Stern’s grand conspiracy of the USPS being controlled by Trump to steal an election made him worthy of a brand new tinfoil hat. The transcript is below. Click "expand": MS NOW’s Katy Tur Reports February 25, 2026 3:44:57 PM Eastern KATY TUR: Should you be able to sue the postal service if a carrier intentionally destroys or refuses to deliver your mail? The Supreme Court says no, in a tight five-to-four ruling that now puts mail-in voting at risk. Joining us, Slate senior writer and co-host of the Amicus podcast, Mark Joseph Stern. Why can't you sue a carrier if they intentionally destroy your mail? MARK JOSEPH STERN: Well, you should be able to, and Congress tried to ensure that you could, but the Supreme Court in this decision really, kind of, strained to reinterpret the statute differently. Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion for the court points out that you can't sue when the postal service loses your mail. So, you know, an envelope stuck in the back of the truck doesn't make it to your mailbox. You can't sue then. And Justice Thomas said, well, look, when mail is stolen by a postal carrier, when it's intentionally destroyed by a postal carrier, that's also lost mail, they're pretty much the same thing. So we don't think that you should be allowed to sue when a postal worker willfully and maliciously destroys or conceals your mail. That was the court's reasoning. TUR: Alright. So, how does this potentially affect mail-in voting? STERN: Well, it's pretty disturbing because this liability for the government, if mail ballots are intentionally withheld or destroyed, was a key deterrent against, kind of, interference with mail voting by postal workers, which has been an issue in the past. Postal workers have been prosecuted and jailed for interfering with mail ballots. They could refuse to deliver mail ballots. They could refuse to pick up and return mail ballots, say, from a liberal enclave in a swing state.  And because of this liability that the postal service has faced until now, USPS has been pretty, pretty sort of on guard against that kind of misconduct. But now that liability is gone, now if an American has their mail ballot stolen or destroyed by a postal worker, they can't sue for damages. They get absolutely nothing.  And so, the post office has much less of an incentive to ensure that this kind of wrongdoing behind the scenes isn't going on. This is something that election integrity experts have been concerned about. This was a sleeper case, but it was on their radar, and now there is real worry that USPS will be less on guard against the malicious destruction or withholding of mail ballots in 2026. TUR: Well, and by the way, this is not hypothetical. It's not like we're thinking - pulling an idea out of thin air and saying, maybe this could happen. This has happened. Here are a few cases. In New Jersey in 2021, a DOJ says a postal employee admits dumping mail, including election ballots sent to West Orange residents. In Kentucky in 2020, a U.S. Postal Service employee was charged for throwing out mail, including more than 100 absentee ballots. And in Florida, in 2024 a postal worker was accused of throwing a ballot and election mail into the woods.  99 million ballots were mailed in 2024 and processed by USPS, by the postal service. If somebody is found to have destroyed a ballot, even if you cannot sue that person for damages, for violating your constitutional right to vote, there are still criminal charges that could be brought against that person, right? STERN: So look, that is true. But we would be relying on Donald Trump's Department of Justice to bring those criminal charges. We would be relying on his handpicked prosecutors, who say that they work on behalf of the president to charge postal workers who destroy ballots. And unfortunately, I didn't think we'd reach this point so quickly, I am not confident that this Justice Department, under the direct control of Trump, would bring charges against a postal worker who say, refused to deliver mail ballots to some liberal area.  This is a Justice Department that has, I think, politicized itself in extraordinary and unprecedented ways. Attempted to charge Democratic lawmakers for their free speech, right. Let Republicans off the hook for a seemingly criminal conduct. It is really not a great backstop for the Supreme Court to just take away all this liability that the postal service faced and to just say, oh, don't worry, the DOJ can step in and prosecute postal workers who do this kind of thing. Not a lot of confidence in that process. TUR: Alright (Sigh). Thank you so much, Mark Joseph Stern. Appreciate it.

Jack Hughes delivered the gold medal to the U.S. ice hockey team in the winter Olympics, scoring the winning goal in overtime play. In a postgame interview, Hughes exclaimed, “This is all about our country now. I love the USA. I love my teammates. It’s unbelievable. The USA hockey brotherhood is so strong ... I am so proud to be an American today.” Moving indeed. But the question is, how much did Hughes’ effusive patriotic sentiments, his exhortation of love of country, resonate across our nation? We don’t hear much these days of unbridled expressions of national pride, of patriotism. And, in fact, feelings of pride in our nation, per Gallup polling released last June, are at an all-time low. Just 58 percent said they were extremely or very proud to be an American. To compare, in 2002, 91 percent said they were extremely or very proud to be an American. What’s happening to our love for our country? Taking a closer look, we find that diminished affection for the USA is not bipartisan. It is disproportionately among Democrats. Looking back to 2002, there was hardly any difference between Republicans and Democrats. Among Republicans, 98 percent said they were extremely/very proud to be an American. Among Democrats, it stood at 92 percent. The average was dragged down by independents, 85 percent of whom said they were extremely or very proud. However, by 2025, only 36 percent of Democrats said they were extremely/very proud. Independents stood at 53 percent and Republicans at 92 percent. One might speculate that the precipitous drop in patriotic sentiment among Democrats is because of the Republican currently occupying the White House. However, we must note that from 2001 to 2025, the percentage of Republicans saying they were extremely/very proud never dropped below 90 percent. The party of the president had no effect on Republican patriotic sentiment.      Gallup annually surveys sentiment toward 30 institutions of our national life – our system of government and how well it works, the size and power of the federal government, corporations, the economy, public schools, healthcare, public education, religion, etc. We find that positive and negative evaluations toward these national institutions are also very different among Republicans and Democrats. During the current term of President Donald Trump, the average positive evaluation of these 30 national institutions among Democrats stood at 27 percent. Average negative evaluation stood at 67 percent. The average negative evaluation among Democrats of these 30 institutions over the last seven presidential terms – Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush – was 56 percent. The average positive evaluation over the same period among Democrats was 38 percent. Among Republicans, over these last seven presidential terms, the negative average was 42 percent, and the positive was 52 percent. So, Republicans are net positive about the country over four presidencies – two Republican and two Democrat – and Democrats are net negative. Even under the Biden presidency, Republicans were more positive about our national institutions than Democrats. Under Biden, the average positive evaluation of these 30 institutions among Democrats stood at 35 percent and negative 60 percent. Among Republicans, under Biden, the average positive evaluation of the 30 institutions was 45 percent and negative was 49 percent. So even under the Democratic Biden presidency, Republicans were more positive about the core institutional structure of the country than Democrats. What can we conclude? Republicans are positive about our country and its institutions and Democrats are not. It doesn’t matter who gets elected. Democrats want a different country. Republicans are grateful to be in a free country, knowing that sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. Democrats want a different country. This hasn’t always been the case. It’s something that has happened over the last 25 years. There was a time when both parties understood we live in a free nation under God. In this 250th year of America’s birthday, we now have one party that no longer wants the nation founded on July 4, 1776. Star Parker is the founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Her recent book, “What Is the CURE for America?” is available now.